![]() Project officials stuck to the original schedule for commissioning at the briefing. ![]() The instruments themselves will undergo tests to confirm they are ready to begin operations. Officials said at the briefing they will now check the alignment in three other instruments on the telescope, tweaking the mirror positions to optimize alignment for all the instruments. The completion of fine phasing comes as JWST nears the halfway mark in its six-month post-launch commissioning. “This is as sharp an image that you can get from a telescope of this size.” The images are focused together as finely as the laws of physics allow,” said Marshall Perrin, JWST deputy telescope scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “We now have achieved what’s called diffraction-limited alignment of the telescope. “The telescope performance so far is everything that we dared hope,” said Jane Rigby, JWST operations project scientist at NASA Goddard. Others at the briefing echoed his sentiments. “The performance is as good, if not better, than our most optimistic predictions.” “The optical performance of the telescope is absolutely phenomenal,” said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for JWST at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a media briefing. The completion of the fine phasing means that the telescope is now fully aligned for one of its main instruments, the Near-Infrared Camera, and that there are no flaws like the spherical aberration in the primary mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope that diminished its performance after launch until corrective optics were installed. Those steps involved very small changes in the positions of JWST’s 18 primary mirror segments such that their images were aligned on top of each other and then matched to within a wavelength of infrared light. The agency announced March 16 that spacecraft team had finished the “coarse phasing” and “fine phasing” steps of alignment of the telescope’s optics. WASHINGTON - NASA has completed the next step in the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope by fine-tuning the alignment of its primary mirror segments, confirming the telescope’s optics will meet or exceed expectations.
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