NASA’s much-awaited James Webb Space Telescope has successfully completed its final tests, the US space agency has said. Engineering teams have completed Webb’s long-spanning comprehensive testing regimen at Northrop Grumman’s facilities The telescope is now being prepared for shipment to its launch site, and can be completed in September, NASA said during a statement on Thursday.
The US space agency recently pushed back the target for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, touted as its next great space observatory, to October 2021 Previously, Webb was targeted to launch in March 2021. The launch has been pushed thanks to impacts from the continued Covid-19 pandemic, also as technical challenges.
“NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has reached a serious turning point on its path toward launch with the completion of ultimate observatory integration and testing,” said Gregory L Robinson, Webb’s program director at NASA Headquarters in Washington, within the statement We have a tremendously dedicated workforce who brought us to the finishing line , and that we are very excited to ascertain that Webb is prepared for launch and can soon get on that science journey,” he added.
While shipment operations are underway, teams located in Webb’s Mission Operations Centre (MOC) at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore will still check and recheck the complex communications network it’ll use in space ,Recently this network fully demonstrated that it’s capable of seamlessly sending commands to the spacecraft. Live launch rehearsals are underway within the MOC with the specific purpose of preparing for launch day and beyond.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a tremendous feat of human ingenuity. it’s a world programme led by NASA with its partners, European Space Agency (ESA) and therefore the Canadian Space Agency The mission has contributions from thousands of scientists, engineers, and other professionals from quite 14 countries and 29 states, in nine different time zones.
Webb are going to be launch from French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America aboard the ESA’s Ariane 5 launch vehicle Moments after completing a 26-minute ride, the spacecraft will break away the rocket and its solar battery will deploy automatically. it’ll take one month to fly to its intended orbital location in space nearly a million miles faraway from Earth, slowly unfolding because it goes.
Scientific operations are expected to commence approximately six months after launch. NASA says that the James Webb Space Telescope is that the world’s largest, most powerful, and sophisticated space science telescope ever built It is designed to assist in solving the mysteries of our system , looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mystifying structures and origins of our universe.