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JWST commissioning

JWST commissioning
JWST commissioning After JWST arrives at L2, its first trip around the L2 “halo orbit” will be jam-packed with work for the JWST team. The telescope commissioning (green) ensures that all 18 segments of the main mirror are aligned and will bring the telescope to perfect focus. The insets on the right show an example of image stacking: moving the segments so that a star’s image from each segment is brought into alignment; the final image is zoomed in to show that all 18 images are correctly stacked. Throughout the telescope commissioning, the science instruments are cooling down and preparing for their own detailed check-outs (purple). The inset on the left shows their relative positions on the sky; the inset box is roughly 20 x 10 arcminutes on a side (for reference, the full moon is about 30 arcminutes across). All dates in this diagram are approximate, and the activities noted represent only a tiny fraction of the commissioning work being done. AURA / S. Lifson