New stunning images show the James Webb Space Telescope’s fully aligned optics

NASA has just announced that they have finally finished the optics alignment on the 10 billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope. This is a huge step when it comes to having an observatory that is infrared and fully functioning. The agency talked about how the observatory will be capable of capturing well focused images with all of the instruments on the telescope such as the Near Infrared Spectrograph and the Mid Infrared Instrument. NASA also says that quality of the images will be diffraction limited.

Key Takeaways:

• The optics alignment on the James Webb Space Telescope has been completed, according to NASA.
• Its instruments are now capable of capturing detailed, diffraction-limited images.
• Next is a science instrument commissioning step, then scientific operations will begin in late June.

“For the optics test, JWST pointed at a part of the Large Magellanic Cloud – a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way – that provided a dense field of hundreds of thousands of stars.”

Read more: https://physicsworld.com/a/new-stunning-images-show-the-james-webb-space-telescopes-fully-aligned-optics/