JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE REACHES ‘PERFECT’ ALIGNMENT
All four science instruments on NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have achieved perfect alignment in advance of the telescope’s debut this summer.
“I’m delighted to report that the telescope alignment has been completed with performance even better than we had anticipated,” Michael Mcelwain, a JWST project scientist, said. “There’s no adjustment to the telescope optics that would make material improvements to our science performance.”
To illustrate the telescope’s readiness, NASA shared a teaser image taken by JWST’S Mid-infrared Instrument, or MIRI. The new image shows a side-by-side comparison of observations of a nearby galaxy taken by JWST, versus observations of the same galaxy taken previously by NASA’S now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope. While the Spitzer image shows a blur of seven or so nearby stars located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the JWST image of the same region captures the foreground stars in sharp detail, offset by wispy clouds of interstellar gas and hundreds of background stars and galaxies. With its instruments aligned, JWST awaits a final instrument calibration before it officially begins studying distant stars later this summer.