Everything is hunky dory so far

James Webb Space Telescope: Everything is 'hunky dory'

The US space agency says the post-launch set-up activities on the new observatory are going well.

www.bbc.co.uk

Good news!

This is the deployment test of the JWST

The video is 7 years old

The telescope is working, but the mirrors need to be aligned properly

James Webb telescope begins to focus its 'big eye'

Engineers start the process of focussing the most powerful telescope ever sent into orbit.

www.bbc.co.uk

These people have been drinking too much of their own product.

The JWST is so far exceeding expectations, as they've now aligned the mirrors

James Webb: 'Fully focused' telescope beats expectations

Engineers align the mirrors of the $10bn observatory to produce a pin-sharp image of a star.

www.bbc.co.uk

Very good news! I don’t know about all of you, but when I spend $10 billion, I like to get pin-sharp images.

Quote from Rice

Very good news! I don’t know about all of you, but when I spend $10 billion, I like to get pin-sharp images.

A much better start than what Hubble got off to. Considering that if it didn’t go right, there was nothing going to get it back

Right!

From NASA’s Mars newsletter today -

Breaking News: President Biden revealed the first image from the Webb Space Telescope, the deepest view yet into our universe’s past, NASA said.

This is absolutely amazing.

NASA unveils first image from James Webb Space Telescope

Joel Achenbach

Updated July 11, 2022 at 8:03 p.m. EDT

NASA’s revolutionary, long-delayed $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has produced its first full-color image, and it’s a doozy: a glimpse deep into space and back in time, capturing the faint light of galaxies forming in the infancy of the cosmos.

The image, revealed Monday in a White House ceremony by President Biden and top NASA officials, shows a cluster of galaxies, called SMACS 0723, that functions as a massive lens, magnifying the extremely faint and cosmically distant objects behind it.

“We’re looking back more than 13 billion years,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the White House event. “Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and that light that you are seeing from one of those little specks, has been traveling for over 13 billion years.”

He added: “And by the way, we’re going back further. Because this is just the first image. … We’re going back almost to the beginning.”

The new image is what is known as a “deep field” observation, with the telescope staring at what NASA called a “patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.”

Outer space when viewed like this looks incredibly crowded — not so very spacious at all. What the Webb sees through this pinhole examination of the cosmic darkness is a hornet’s nest of brilliant but enigmatic objects in many colors. A smattering of stars have parked themselves in the foreground, but everything else is a galaxy — a vast agglomeration of stars, rendered into a small splash of light by the immense distances involved.

Full story:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/07/11/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-images/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert

Amazing images released by NASA -

… Continuing the subject of your BBC article on moon missions, Splinter , here’s an excerpt from Jonathan V Last’s newsletter this morning:

“Artemis 1 lights up on Monday and I’m pretty juiced. It’s the first of three planned missions: Artemis 2 will send a crew to Moon orbit. Artemis 3 will land astronauts on the Moon. Jatan Mehta writes a newsletter about space and devotes every Monday to Moon-talk. Here he is talking through Artemis 3:

Quote

Its astronauts will reach lunar orbit in an Orion spacecraft blasted from Earth by an SLS rocket. A crewed lunar variant of SpaceX Starship called the Human Landing System(HLS) will dock with Orion, and carry astronauts to the surface and back. While NASA’s selection of HLS Starship and commercial spacesuits largely culminate the technology stack to be used for this historic return of humans to the Moon after Apollo, the science end is now catching up. . . .
[T]he agency has now announced 13 candidate landing zones for Artemis III, chosen meticulously using data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, decades of lunar science findings, and keeping in mind engineering constraints (discussed below).

A few interesting things to note about these selections:

• Since a key priority of Artemis III is to cryogenically sample and bring pristine and precious lunar polar volatiles to Earth for meticulous studies, nearly all the landing zones contain numerous big and small permanently shadowed regions with Earth-facing slopes. This was expected but it’s good to have it anchored. Also considering that some of these zones contain locations with ancient crustal and/or mantle material, Artemis III is likely to further advance our understanding of the Moon’s origin and evolution.
• At least two currently known landing regions of NASA CLPS missions show up for Artemis III too.

  
  

  • The VIPER rover is set to explore an area near the western edge of the Nobile crater whereas two Artemis III zones are on Nobile’s rim.
  • Intuitive Machines’ second lunar lander will touchdown on a ridge connected to the Shackleton crater.
• The inclusion of the Malapert and Leibnitz plateaus is interesting because their near-polar locations coupled with high altitudes uniquely afford them practically 100% Earth-visibility despite the Moon’s libration.

Like any mission to the Moon’s poles, choosing a landing site for Artemis III has unique challenges. The steep, rocky polar terrain renders flat areas only about 100 meters across, which thus become the unforgiving landing precision requirement for HLS Starship or any lander. Moreover, the terrain coupled with the forever near-horizon, circling Sun provide sufficiently continuous lighting only to elevated areassuch as crater rims or peaks, that too at different times for different places. The final landing site and launch date(s) for the Artemis III mission, which needs continuous lunar polar sunlight for 6.5 days, will thus be selected based on aforementioned factors as well as combined constraints from SLS, Orion, and Starship.

Read the whole thing and subscribe. It’s free and it’s great.