NASA and its partners have announced that the optics alignment on the $10bn James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is now complete – marking another significant step towards a fully functioning infrared observatory.
Yesterday, the space agency announced that the observatory is now capable of capturing crisp, well-focused images with each of its onboard science instruments – the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCAM), the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS).
For the optics test, JWST pointed at a part of the Large Magellanic Cloud – a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way – that provided a dense field of hundreds of thousands of stars. As well as images from the four instruments, the release also contains pictures from the Fine Guidance Sensor, which is used to track guide stars to point the observatory accurately and precisely.
NASA says that the image quality to all instruments is “diffraction-limited”, which means that the detail acquired is “as good as physically possible given the size of the telescope”. A new cosmic dawn: peering across the universe with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope
“These remarkable test images from a successfully aligned telescope demonstrate what people across countries and continents can achieve when there is a bold scientific vision to explore the universe,” notes Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for the JWST who is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The next and final series of preparations towards a fully commissioned observatory is science instrument commissioning. This will take about two months to complete before scientific operations begin, which is expected in late June.
The JWST is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
