The Webb telescope reaches its destination to revolve around the sun

Thirty days after its launch, the James Webb, the largest and most powerful space telescope in the world has reached its final destination: Lagrange 2, an observation post one million miles (1.5 million km) from Earth.

Webb was eventually pushed into a orbit around this location thanks to a brief five-minute thruster burn. Controllers on Earth will now spend the next few months fine-tuning the telescope to get it ready for science.

The mirrors of the space observatory still they must be meticulously aligned and the infrared detectors must cool sufficiently before science observations can begin in June. But flight controllers in Baltimore were elated after scoring another hit.

Webb, billed as the successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope and with a value of 10,000 million dollars from NASA, was launched on December 25 from French Guiana. Due to its large size, it had to be launched folded inside the Ariane 5, a European rocket. Its general objectives are to take pictures of the first stars to shine in the Universe and to probe distant planets that may be habitable.

Lagrange Point 2 is one of five gravitational “sweet spots” around the Sun and Earth where satellites can maintain their position with few orbital adjustments., thus conserving fuel. The other advantage is that Webb will not experience at L2 the large changes in temperature and light experienced by space telescopes much closer to Earth. This is vital to the mission.

Five questions about the James Webb Space Telescope, which will survey the universe

This designed to view the cosmos in infrared light and therefore you need to maintain constant super-cold conditions for your hardware. Infrared light has wavelengths that are slightly longer than those of visible light. “Seeing” in the infrared will allow the telescope, for example, to look through dust to oget images of stars that would otherwise be obscured.

“It is a long process. It can take up to three months during the start-up and we are ready to do it,” Begoña Vila, an instrument systems engineer at NASA, told BBC News.

So far, the Webb mission hasn’t made a single misstep. The launch and the trip to L2 were uneventful. And even the complex task of unfolding the telescope after it left the top of the Ariane rocket was made to seem like the easiest of trials.

“We were delighted with the accuracy and success of all those deploymentssaid Kyle Hott, mission systems engineering lead at Northrop Grumman, the US aerospace company that co-led the telescope’s development with the US space agency. “It’s pretty incredible to think that the whole thing was just a concept on paper decades ago, and now it’s really here. Morale is high and we are very excited”. (I)