By placing the telescopes on a high mountain top, we avoid as much atmosphere as possible. Stars twinkle, light from the faint stellar objects are absorbed by the thick lower atmosphere, and part of the spectrum, such as infrared rays from space, hardly reach the ground. The thermal turbulence of the Earth’s atmosphere hinders telescopic observation of the universe. The first image from the telescope is at least six months away. This will be followed by weeks of testing and calibration. After it arrives at its destination, the 18 telescope mirror segments will have to be aligned flawlessly this will take about 10 days. On day 29, the JWST is expected to fire its thrusters to enter its predestined orbit around L2. The rest of the mirror segments would be unfurled, step by step, before day 14. On day 10, nerves will be on edge as the engineers hoist its secondary mirror to its position. Before day 7, the sun-shield would be deployed. Speeding towards its destination, as of now, the JWST has successfully deployed its solar array, released its antenna and completed its mid-course correction burn. A single misstep can reduce the whole telescope into space junk. In the next few weeks, step by step, various components have to be deployed before the telescope reaches its final configuration. Now in space, hundreds of moving parts will need to fall in place precisely as designed for the telescope to unfold. The telescope was intricately folded like an origami toy before it was launched. The successful launch is just the beginning of an arduous nearly one-month journey. What awaits the telescope in the next part of the journey? Therefore, the JWST would observe fainter stellar objects that Hubble cannot detect. JWST will have about seven times as much light-gathering capability as Hubble. As the JWST’s diameter is larger than that of Hubble’s it will collect more photons than Hubble’s 2.4 metres mirror. It will also give the telescope the required temperature to detect faint signals from distant stellar objects. Therefore, the spacecraft positioned at L2 will orbit the Sun, tagging along with the Earth in 365 days. At this point, the Earth-Sun system’s gravitational forces, and the spacecraft’s orbital motion would balance each other. After a 29 day-long journey, the spacecraft with the telescope will arrive at a point in space called ‘Lagrange point 2’, also known as L2.The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), hurled into space by the Ariane 5 rocket will now be able to observe the farthest reaches of the universe without any atmospheric turbulence.
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