Kind: captions
Language: en
the James Webb Space Telescope also
known as jwst
es the limits of engineering
it is the largest most Innovative Space
Telescope ever built about a month after
launch
jwst is already a million miles from
Earth
although the wings of the primary mirror
unfolded without a hitch its 18 segments
still need to be aligned to work as one
how do you align a telescope how do you
align segments in space we're doing it
in a way you know that's never been done
before
chmere is built with actuators so its
position can be tweaked side to side
forward and backward just about any
position you can think of
we'll be figuring out how to command the
mirrors to essentially go from being a
millimeter misalignment between mirrors
to about a factor of a million better
than that about one ten thousandth of a
human hair from Mirror to mirror
the process begins with a single star
so first thing to do is take an image of
a star we picked a very bright star with
very few neighbors
a series of images are taken with an
onboard camera called near cam we don't
know what it's going to look like so
that's going to be very exciting and the
goal of this game is to find 18 images
of the same Stars we're trying to find
where the 18 different spots of lidar
and I see one two three four
who feels ambitious enough to point at
all 18. the very first images that we'll
get will actually be of essentially 18
separate spots that are kind of like 18
separate telescopes because each mirror
kind of acts like its own telescope so
let's see we got one two three four five
six once we find 18 images of the same
star eight nine ten I can tell you that
our team is going to be very very happy
15 16 17 and 18 is over there definitely
looks like all 18 segments though that's
exactly what we're looking for I'm
seventh heaven because everything worked
and and none of the issues we thought
could crop up did everything worked
right out of the box so great
but they're not done yet
the next step is a bit like putting the
pieces of a puzzle together
our job will be to figure out which
mirror goes with each spot for example
there's two mirror segments they may be
tilted off like this right so the light
from the Star comes down and then one
goes this way and the other goes that
way right over the next few weeks they
will move the mirrors to arrange the
images of the star
before bringing them into Focus
that one's pretty sharp those other ones
are going to take some more work to line
up later I think right now we're getting
18 separate blurry images but when we're
done
we'll see one bright star and that's
when we're gonna know that we have built
a perfect telescope then I'll be able to
take the science images I'm here for
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by mid-march all 18 mirrors are working
in Harmony and jwst produces its first
fully aligned image
an image of a single star turns out to
be far more
this is an engineering image that was
really there just to say we focused it
right
and
there's a lot of galaxies you know you
know the the engineers were like what
are all those galaxies doing there
we're realizing we're the first people
that have ever seen these galaxies
[Music]
since the first Hubble Deep fields in
the 90s where Hubble just stared at an
empty patch of the sky for for days at a
time and made this beautiful deep feel
foreign we just did that in about under
an hour
what that makes possible is that every
Field's a deep field now
their observations planned that are
weeks long instead of just an hour
everything about these images that I've
seen so far tells us absolutely this
thing is going to be fantastic we don't
know what we're going to see but we know
we haven't seen anything like this
before this is going to be
transformative this is looking amazing
thank you
[Music]