NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reaches cosmic parking spot TODAY and can start looking BACK in time

THE JAMES Webb Space Telescope is due to reach its parking spot in deep space today, according to NASA.

Nearly a month after it launched, the James Webb Space Telescope is finally slipping into its cosmic parking spot on Monday, NASA says.

Webb will be orbiting Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), which is about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth in the direction of Mars, and where the Sun and Earth’s gravity are of equal strength.

The telescope will be floating at L2 to scour the night sky for faint infrared light.

These lights, which could be visible from the first generation of stars and galaxies, will help researchers get a better understanding of the early days of our universe.

Some other goals of the Webb mission include glancing at distant exoplanets and hopefully answering some of science’s most important questions like how quickly the universe is expanding.

However, it will take several months to calibrate the telescope and make sure everything is good to go before it can start doing its job.

Some of these tasks include precisely aligning the telescope’s 18 primary mirror segments so they work collectively as a 21.3-foot-wide mirror, which is the largest ever launched.

Astronomer Scott Friedman, who is managing this next phase of Webb’s journey, said that “everything could go perfectly, and it would still take six months” from launch for the telescope to be ready to collect data.

Once the telescope is ready for action, though, it will be 100 times more powerful than Hubble, according to NASA.

In fact, the instrument will be so sensitive to infrared light that it could detect the heat of a bumblebee as far away as the moon, according to CBS.

Researchers have high hopes for the $10 billion telescope, which launched on December 25 of last year.

Reuters

The Webb telescope comes equipped with 18 primary mirrors.[/caption]

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