NASA's Webb in Full Focus, Ready for Instrument Commissioning
hubie writes:
NASA has announced that the last stage of mirror alignments for the JWST are complete. Phased and focused images are being delivered to all of the science instruments. With the optics taken care of, the last operation before it is ready is to commission the science instruments. The instruments will be run through their paces and calibrations to make sure they are operating as expected. This last stage is expected to take up to two months.
The alignment of the telescope across all of Webb's instruments can be seen in a series of images that captures the observatory's full field of view.
[...] The optical performance of the telescope continues to be better than the engineering team's most optimistic predictions. Webb's mirrors are now directing fully focused light collected from space down into each instrument, and each instrument is successfully capturing images with the light being delivered to them. The image quality delivered to all instruments is "diffraction-limited," meaning that the fineness of detail that can be seen is as good as physically possible given the size of the telescope. From this point forward the only changes to the mirrors will be very small, periodic adjustments to the primary mirror segments.
[...] Though telescope alignment is complete, some telescope calibration activities remain: As part of scientific instrument commissioning, the telescope will be commanded to point to different areas in the sky where the total amount of solar radiation hitting the observatory will vary to confirm thermal stability when changing targets. Furthermore, ongoing maintenance observations every two days will monitor the mirror alignment and, when needed, apply corrections to keep the mirrors in their aligned locations.
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