Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI / Courtesy
The American space agency NASA achieved an important milestone in the preparation of the new James Webb Space Telescope.
After completing a critical step in aligning its mirrors, NASA released the first sharp image generated by the $ space observatory ,000 millions of dollars.
The protagonist of the test is a star who appears with a sharp performance who , according to NASA engineers, is much better than expected.
To get to this stage, all of Webb’s mirrors had to be aligned within tiny fractions of the width of a human hair.
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But the The agency warns that there are still months of work to be done before the telescope can be declared operational and deliver its new vision of the cosmos. Lee Feinberg, the NASA engineer who led the development of Webb’s optical elements, describes as “phenomenal” the issue of the first image focused correctly.
“ Not only do you see the star and the diffraction spikes from the star, but you also see other stars in the field that are in tight focus, just as we hope, and all sorts of other interesting structures in the background,” Feinberg told the press.
“In fact, we have carried out a very detailed analysis of the images we are obtaining and, so far, what we have found is that performance is as good, if not better, than our prediction More optimistic“, he added.
The James Webb, who was presented as the successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope, it was launched on 25 last December by an Ariane-5 rocket from French Guiana.
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