NASA reported that the James Webb Space Telescope arrived at its new home on Monday after traveling over a million miles. The arrival of the spacecraft completes another difficult step as scientists on Earth prepare to spend at least a decade studying distant light from the beginning of time with the observatory.
The $10 billion truck-size telescope reached a position in orbit above the sun where it will operate for the life of its mission, NASA said soon after 2 p.m. ET Monday. According to the agency, the gravitational forces exerted by the sun and Earth at that region, known as Lagrange 2 (L2), balance out a spacecraft's orbital motion, allowing it to stay in a certain spot close to our planet.
NASA James Webb Space Telescope Smoothly Parked At L2
Thankfully, JWST executed this final move smoothly. Bill Ochs, the JWST project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement that JWST had achieved extraordinary success. Ochs commended all the people who worked many years if not decades, ensuring mission success throughout the previous month.
JWST arrived at its ultimate destination this afternoon in a short amount of time. When JWST arrived, it fired its onboard thrusters for around 5 minutes. JWST completed the third of three-course correction burns, slowing the spacecraft sufficiently to place it into a highly accurate orbit in space.
JWST is now orbiting an Earth-Sun Lagrange point, which is an intangible place in space. It's a magical region of space where the Sun's and Earth's gravity and centripetal forces are exactly perfect, allowing things to remain in a somewhat "stable" location.
"There's a little tug of war going on where [gravity] balances out perfectly," Jean-Paul Pinaud, the ground operations delta-V lead at Northrop Grumman, the primary contractor of JWST, told The Verge.
Here's What's Next For JWST
According to NASA (via Wall Street Journal), Webb utilized as little fuel as possible during the course adjustments to save as much as possible for routine operations, such as doing tiny movements every 21 days or so to keep the observatory in its planned orbit. Keith Parrish, Webb's observatory commissioning manager at NASA's Goddard site, said Webb might last some decades.
Before the telescope can begin its mission, it must align its mirrors and calibrate its onboard equipment, among other things. NASA estimates that routine scientific activities will begin in around five months. The telescope is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope, with a 21.5-foot-wide golden primary mirror and infrared sensors, and is meant to capture views of stars and galaxies.
Monday's achievement was the latest in a high-stakes mission that involved the unfolding of Webb's mirrors, which were folded up like origami in the rocket's nose cone during launch. Webb was built by a team led by Northrop Grumman Corp. and features 344 discrete "single-point failure" components that might have derailed the mission if any of them failed.
Check out more news and information on Space in Science Times.
