The James Webb Space Telescope key pointing instrument fixed on to a star for the first time, two space agencies reported. The Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), a contribution from Honeywell on behalf of the Canadian Space Agency, will be used for aligning the James Webb Space Telescope’s 18 hexagonal segments that make up the primary mirror.
The James Webb Space Telescope locks on to a star, a rogue moonbound rocket is reidentified as Chinese and a new Polaris Program starts at SpaceX.
Over the course of the past two weeks, ground operators pointed the James Webb Space Telescope to 156 different positions around the star’s presumed location about 260 light years away from Earth, generating 1,560 images in total. They then stitched all of those captures together to create the fuzzy image above.
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The result is as if a person’s eyes were pointed in multiple directions, causing them to see double, Scarlin Hernandez, flight systems engineer at the NASA James Webb Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a live stream on January 24.
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The trial images were taken with James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam, which can detect infrared wavelengths between 0.6 microns to 5 microns, or just outside the visible light range. That will allow the telescope to detect some of the earliest formations of stars and galaxies.
The Hubble Space Telescope mostly captures visible light, so Webb should be able to vastly expand humanity’s window into deep space.
NASA chose this star, known by the catchy name HD 84406, because of its isolated brightness. This makes it a good test case as the James Webb Space Telescope team aligns each of the 18 hexagonal mirror segments.
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Over the next month or so, they’ll use gyroscopes to adjust the orientation by as little as about 1/10,000 of a human hair, so those pinpricks can eventually merge to portray one crystal clear star.
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But even after all this finetuning to get the James Webb Space Telescope up and running, the engineers will need to constantly tweak the mirrors’ positions to make sure the images reflect full accuracy and detail. “It’s designed to be adjusted any time that it needs to be,” Hernandez said last month. “It’s a continuous process to make sure they’re perfectly aligned.”
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