James Webb Telescope Has Sights Set On FIRST Target

 

Humanity's time machine now has a

 target. Star light star bright, the

 first star Webb we'll see is HD 84406 a

 sun-like star about 260 light years away with this announcement nasa gave the world the object of the James Webb space telescope's first peak at the universe's past and it's in the tale of Ursa Major HD 84406 gets the honor of being the perfect target for web when its 10 billion dollar eye opens and begins to focus its spectacular golden mirrors the winner has the perfect brilliance will stay in Webb's field of view long enough for the precise optical alignments and is in a rather desolate region of the greater bear what's even better HD 84406 can be seen

 through regular binoculars so we mortals can share in this historic moment welcome the Science Reads in today's article we plunge into the wondrous project that is the James Webb Space Telescope dig into what lies ahead for the next several months and how this spacecraft will very likely change our understanding of our universe as the world watched humanity's greatest effort at peering into our cosmic past left home and trekked roughly a million miles to its celestial parking spot the incredibly complex unfolding of this gold-plated space origami kept the scientific world and the curious among us holding our breaths and now it's done this combined effort by nasa the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency reached its destination in 30 days only after a secretive 16-day trek on a ship with a military escort from California through the Panama Canal to the ESA spaceport in French Guiana why secretive and why the military escort to avoid the minuscule but not impossible danger of piracy of course Webb welcome home with these words nasa administrator bill nelson announced the James Webb space telescope's arrival at its l2 destination 30 days after its Christmas morning launch we're one step closer to uncovering the mysteries of the universe and i can't wait to see Webb's first new views of the universe this summer so what exactly are we looking for baby pictures the birth of the universe nearly 14 billion years ago is shrouded in mystery yes there are aspects we've deduced from best evidence but how much do we really know web is set to change that in a big way by peering back into the time capsule that is deep space to just about the earliest light possible to see in fact it should detect infrared light from galaxies so far away that the light has taken almost the

 entire history of the universe to reach us very much like a time machine we are trying to build up the story of how the first galaxies ever emerged and how those evolved into galaxies we see today and we live in today says Dr. Maruska Bradach of the University of California Davis if you don't get the beginning right it's really difficult to figure out what the whole evolution looked like and to do that we need a time machine the guy who lives next to me is always like i have a jacuzzi on my balcony i have a jacuzzi on my balcony but wait until i tell him i've got a time machine on my balcony getting to the l2 orbital point is a great accomplishment especially considering the never-before-done trick of launching a massive telescope that is folded tight only to unfold it in the depths of space far from human ability to lay on hands and fix a problem not to mention unfurling and stretching the tennis court sized sunshield's five thin layers without which Webb's delicate instrumentation becomes space toast faster than you can say is it warm in here yet there's so much more to come we're just setting the table said Keith Parrish observatory manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center after Webb reached its final destination we were just getting on station getting this beautiful spacecraft unfolded and ready to do science the best is yet to come even though Webb has reached L2 the point where gravitational forces of the earth and sun balance with its orbital motion

 there is still navigation to do

 there are tiny periodic adjustments needed to keep Webb properly located in orbit

 and a team of scientists will perform a small maneuver every three weeks to keep it on course that schedule could change as of course nothing like Webb has been maintained at l2 before and the team will be learning how the spacecraft behaves on the fly at this point when Webb reached L2 with its incredibly complex unfurling complete undoubtedly there was a collective sigh of relief among hundreds of scientists engineers designers and instrument builders but now there's a whole other set of instruments and mechanisms to be fired up and tested and an incredible amount of fine tuning to be made so guess what it's time for more breath holding before the beautifully intricate mirror begins adjusting and taking its first blurry images complex instrumentation will be turned on and operated the first image taken by web will actually be of a crowded group of stars to make sure that light is getting through the telescope and into the instruments properly so just the test the image will not be focused as the mirror fine-tuning will not have been done but nasa will know the process is working then roughly two weeks after reaching its long-term parking spot the intricate work of adjusting the primary mirror segments begins with identifying each segment with its image of a star in the camera the mid-infrared instrument MIRI will also be turned on at this time and with any luck astronomers expect to be able to take the first science quality images after 90 days yes it will take a while but with the most incredible mirror ever conceived of by humanity a little patience is a virtue patience is a good thing right up until you get anxious for something you are eager for to hurry up and arrive but that is what the scientific world needs for just a few more months after all nearly three decades of work and 10 billion dollars went into the most powerful telescope ever created and scientists absolutely want to get it right it starts with a mirror and what a mirror it is this jewel is covered with slightly more than 48 grams of a microscopically thin layer of gold to optimize reflection of infrared light so thin that the entire mirror's gold layer would fill the volume of a marble or five men's wedding rings the mirror spends 21.3 feet or 6.5 meters with 18 hexagonal segments each of which moves in seven angles operated by seven pistons and actuators all of this must be aligned perfectly to get pictures that we anticipate but truly cannot imagine until we see them and of course there's the smaller round secondary mirror that also needs tweaking the process starts by painstakingly aligning each mirror by centimeters and gets incrementally smaller until the units are less than one ten thousandth a width of a human hair smaller than a virus the actuators which are 126 tiny motors along for the ride are moved only one at a time to reduce complexity and ensure safety by focusing on a single movement in fact it takes about a day to move

 all 18 segments by a single millimeter

 for the record that's slower than reading grass grow much like a photographer takes preliminary shots to ensure lighting and background are all in order before getting down to serious work Webb will take several blurry images during setup okay so not the most thrilling part of the James Webb space telescope's mission but the end goal is so much worth a little patience right that's a good day to circle on your calendar because it's around this day that engineers expect the mirrors to be fully aligned it will have been four months from launch before Webb's marvelous mirror is fully aligned and all instruments focused and for them to work properly the temperature must drop to negative 388 Fahrenheit infrared background noise is suppressed at this temperature and that's critical for those baby pictures of the universe we hope to put into humanity's scrapbook but it's the end of April and the mirror is ready so why does the web team say we must wait until the end of June at the earliest for actual science to get underway it's the instrumentation each of the four incredibly complex and intricately linked instruments on board must be calibrated and tested in each of its many operational modes this sequence lasts over two months so what do you think about Webb's arrival at L2 and the waiting game the scientific world must now endure what are you most excited to see revealed by humanity's time machine tell us in the comments  you