How NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will get ready for its first cosmic observations

 

With NASA's newest space observatory exactly on schedule in its commissioning phase, the science team outlined their plan to make the most of this $10 billion opportunity.

The James Webb Space Telescope arrived days ago at its destination at the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), which is about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet. 

The principal investigators of the Webb science team outlined their plan in a town hall Friday (Jan. 28) hosted online by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore. 

The town hall took place as engineers continued to work on getting the observatory up and running. A key milestone, turning on its science instruments, happened this week. Technicians also continue to align the mirrors and otherwise ready the observatory through five more months of commissioning.

Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope works in pictures

The full image shows NASA's James Webb Space Telescope as a tiny speck among a sea of background stars. The stars appear smudged because the telescope was tracking the motion of JWST, which appears as a small white speck. (Image credit: Gianluca Masi/The Virtual Telescope Project)

Jonathan Gardner, Webb deputy senior project scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, walked through the last few months of preparations before giving a brief update on how things are going in orbit. In a few words, everything is going to plan, he noted.

"There were 50 major deployments; they have all been successful," he said of the telescope's mirror unfolding, as an example of the major milestones Webb achieved.

Meanwhile, amateurs and professionals alike area already sending back data from backyard observatories and professional locations. For example, he said, people have also been taking "light curves" at places such as the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope.

Webb's brightness changes in a repeatable six-hour cycle as the observatory's solar array reflects a glint of sunlight back towards the Earth, during its regular spin, Gardner said. "The sunshield reflects the sunlight directly at the Earth, and [sometimes] has a glint and at other times, it's more diffuse light," Gardner said.