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IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

James Webb Space Telescope reaches deep-space destination

• https://newatlas.com, By David Szondy

At 2:00 pm EST, it fired its main engines for 297 seconds to alter its velocity by 3.6 miles per hour (1.6 m/s) and send it into its new orbit.

The final course correction for the long-delayed US$10 billion space telescope comes at the end of a month-long suspenseful process of deploying the spacecraft, which was folded up like a giant piece of origami so it would fit into the nose cone for its launch on December 25, 2021, from ESA's Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guiana.

During the passage to L2, the JWST deployed its solar array and communications antenna, spread out and tensioned its tennis court-sized sun shield, and raised and unfolded its 6.5 m (24 ft) wide primary mirror. The latter is made of a matrix of 18 gold-plated beryllium hexagons controlled by hundreds of actuators that mission control used to ensure correct calibration as temperature dropped to below -223.2 °C (-369.7 °F).

Today's engine burn was calculated to be as short as possible to conserve propellant. By doing this, the onboard thrusters used to keep the JWST on station and pointing in the right direction can keep operating for over 10 years.

Unlike most spacecraft, the JWST isn't orbiting the Earth, Sun, or some other celestial body. Instead, it revolves around L2, which is one of five points in the neighborhood of Earth where the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth balance one another out, creating a semi-stable point in space where a satellite can go into what is called halo orbit, which is a special three-dimensional orbit.

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