![]() ![]() Twenty-nine days after launch, the telescope will reach its final destination, beyond the moon, straddling the gravitational forces of Earth and the sun. Ten to 14 days after launch, the telescope’s primary mirrors will unfold and snap into place, forming its iconic beehive-like panel of gold-plated mirror segments, spanning 21 feet wide. Several other instruments will deploy throughout the process. Two days after the arms unfold, the shield itself is expected to stretch out, spending two more days carefully tightening itself, a process engineers call tensioning. The shield is a delicate five-layer blanket of thin, silvery plastic that will protect Webb’s scientific instruments from the sun’s heat. Three days after launch, engineers will command two arms on each side of the telescope to fold down to support the telescope’s sun shield, which is 69 feet tall and 46 feet wide. Everything after that will be controlled by mission managers on the ground, who will decide when to move forward with each subsequent deployment depending on how well the process is going. Webb’s solar panel array and antenna will spring out automatically within the first day. Likewise, when planets pass in front of their home star, their atmospheres are backlit by the star, allowing the researchers to use the telescope to search for the spectroscopic signatures of elements crucial to life, like oxygen, water and carbon dioxide, in the planet’s atmosphere. Spectroscopic studies of those dots can reveal what they are made of. The telescope is equipped with a coronagraph, which blocks out the brilliant glare of the central star in a distant planetary system so that the far less brilliant planets can be seen as dots orbiting the star. The big question is, do any of these worlds harbor life, or could they?Īstronomers using the Webb will have plenty of tools at their disposal to help probe the secrets of a few dozen of the closest exoplanets, as well as find more. That’s a mere scratch at the surface, suggesting that there are at least as many planets as stars in the Milky Way. In the years since NASA and its partners began building the Webb telescope, astronomers have discovered more than 4,000 worlds that orbit other stars in our galaxy - so-called exoplanets. An artist’s concept of the Trappist-1 system with the kind of exoplanets the Webb telescope may help study. ![]()
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