Thomas Surbuchen, head of scientific missions from NASA, said on Tuesday that the James Webb Space Telescope had fully opened the five-layer sunshade heat shield needed to observe the universe, overcoming a “tough phase” on the list.

Although the Observatory still has a long way to go, the opening of this umbrella is essential to protect scientific instruments from the sun’s heat and even from radiation emitted by the Earth and the Moon – they operate only at very low temperatures and in the dark. Light from distant parts of the universe.

The next step is to open the mirror: first the secondary and small are placed on the ends of the tripod, and then the main is covered with gold and 6.6 m in diameter.

The telescope was too large to fit on a rocket, so it had to fold itself like an origami and deploy in space, which is a very dangerous process.

“This is a very special day,” tweeted Klose Pontopidan, astronomer and chief scientist at James Webb. “I think it’s time to realize that we will soon have a fully functional giant space telescope.”

Giant sunguard

The umbrella measures 20 to 14 meters and is the size of a tennis court and has the shape of a diamond.

Its layers, as thin as hair, are folded like an acrodian, and now stretch tens of thousands of inches.

They are built by Captain, as the nearest face to the sun reaches 125 degrees Celsius and the farthest face reaches -235 degrees Celsius.

Its opening was made possible thanks to the motors extending each spark plug from each end of the diamond and the hundreds of points and cables that guide them.

On Monday, the first three layers were successfully opened and extended. The teams did the same on Tuesday morning and the last two. Prior to that, two “palette structures” containing the solar plexus were activated.

Astronomers around the world are waiting Anxiety James Web, The most powerful space telescope, will allow us to observe the first galaxies formed hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. The big news is that it will work on the spectrum Infra-red Near and medium wavelength visible to the naked eye.

Launched a week ago from French Guiana, the observatory is currently 900,000 km from Earth. At 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, its exact orbit is four times the distance between our planet and the Moon.

James Web Will be at a place known as the point Lagrange 2 (L2). This is a region where celestial objects exist under the influence of low gravity from Earth and the Sun, meaning they remain “parked” in space.

At this point, if there are any problems, a repair mission cannot be sent.

On December 31, NASA released a timelapse showing the telescope’s path from the Moon’s orbit to the Orion stars. Finally, you can see the moment the telescope heads in the opposite direction L2.

To illustrate the path, scientists at the North York Astronomical Association (NYAA) combined photographs with another space image, showing the path in a colored white line. (With AFP)