James Webb telescope completes epic deployment sequence

It’s done. The biggest astronomical mirror ever sent into space is assembled and ready for focusing. The golden reflector, the centrepiece of the new James Webb telescope, was straightened out on Saturday into its full, 6.5m-wide, concave shape. The mirror had been folded like a drop-leaf table for the mission’s Christmas Day launch.

James Webb is set now to become a transformative tool in the study of all parts of the cosmos. Scientists intend to use the $10bn observatory and its remarkable mirror to capture events that occurred just a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang. They want to see the very first stars to light up the Universe. They’ll also train the telescope’s big “eye” on the atmospheres of distant planets to see if those worlds might be habitable. “Webb has the potential to blow people away, even people who are used to the pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope - and I know that’s hard to imagine,” said Lee Feinberg, who’s led the Webb mirror development team at the US space agency (Nasa). “Webb is so powerful, almost anywhere we look we’re going to be breaking new ground in a huge way,” he said. —(Agencies)