How engineers got NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope ready to take its first images - The Verge
On July 12th, NASA will reveal the first full-color images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s most powerful space observatory. Those pictures are the culmination of six months of work aligning the telescope’s mirrors and commissioning the instruments.
For the past six months, Scott Friedman and a team of roughly 160 scientists and engineers have been working through one of the most daunting to-do lists in all of science. Nearly every day, they dropped everything at 1:30PM ET to meet and find out how much closer they’ve gotten to their goal: getting NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space observatory in history, fully operational.
During each meeting, they reviewed all the work they had done over the last 24 hours with the observatory, which is currently zooming through deep space roughly 1 million miles from Earth. Sometimes their testing and measurements had gone well the day before, and they’d forge ahead with the next task. Other times, there’d be hiccups.
“We would have our scheduler there too and say, ‘All right, this one didn’t work so it has to be rescheduled. Let’s get it in the schedule as soon as we can so we can continue,’” Friedman, the lead commissioning scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI, tells The Verge. “And that was a tricky business.”
It was always going to be a monumental task to get the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, up and running. Equipped with the largest mirror we’ve ever sent into space, the observatory is set to fundamentally transform astronomy as we know it by capturing the light from stars and galaxies that formed while the Universe was in its infancy. But, before JWST can start collecting all these baby pictures of the cosmos, NASA and STScI, which oversees the telescope’s operations and science, needed to know that all of JWST’s state-of-the-art instruments and hardware could actually work in tandem to get the job done.
Now, the commissioning team is wrapping up their work, having successfully completed all their assignments just a few weeks late of their summer deadline. For a telescope that’s already a decade behind schedule, the team was remarkably punctual — all things considered. Thanks to their efforts, JWST is on the cusp of starting its first year of epic science observations. This transformational period of astronomy will begin with the release of the first full-color images taken by the observatory on July 12th. NASA hasn’t said yet what exactly the images will be, but we do know they’ll include a detailed look at the atmosphere of a planet outside our Solar System and the “deepest image of our Universe that has ever been taken,” according to NASA administrator Bill Nelson.
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