This week, the three-month process of aligning the telescope began – and over the last day, Webb team members saw the first photons of starlight that traveled through the entire telescope and were detected by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. This milestone marks the first of many steps to capture images that are at …
By Katrina Wesencraft As project manager for NASA's Scientifically Calibrated In-flight Imagery (SCIFLI) group, Dr. Jennifer Inman is used to managing complicated logistics and solving problems ahead of her team's deployments. Someone needs a new laptop? No problem. A research plane needs new window panels? OK! The SCIFLI team – which specializes in in-flight imaging …
Following Webb's arrival at its orbital destination around Lagrange Point 2 (L2) on Jan. 24, the mission operations team began working its way through a critical series of steps: powering on all the science instruments, turning off heaters to begin a long cooldown process, and ultimately capturing the first photons on Webb's primary camera to …
Landsat 9, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), passed its post-launch assessment review and is now in its operational phase. Continuing the Landsat program's nearly 50-year record of imaging Earth from orbit, USGS plans to start releasing Landsat 9 data to the public in mid-February and will announce data availability …
NASA's HERMES mission – a four-instrument suite to be mounted outside NASA's Moon-orbiting Gateway – passed a critical mission review on Jan. 27, 2022. The review, Key Decision Point C, evaluated the mission's preliminary design and program plan to achieve launch by its target launch readiness date no earlier than November 2024. With the …
The big news for Webb this week was the final insertion into orbit around the second Lagrange point. The team also turned on the High-Gain Antenna, enabling downlink to Earth through the Deep Space Network using the Ka radio band. The Ka-band provides a much higher data rate than the S-band that Webb has been …
By Jim Cawley NASA's Kennedy Space Center An activity completed at Astrotech's Space Operations facility in Titusville today brings NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite T (GOES-T) mission one significant step closer to its March 1, 2022, liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida in just over a month. On Jan. 27, 2022, the …
Today, at 2 p.m. EST, Webb fired its onboard thrusters for nearly five minutes (297 seconds) to complete the final postlaunch course correction to Webb's trajectory. This mid-course correction burn inserted Webb toward its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, nearly 1 million miles away from the Earth. The final mid-course …
On Monday, Jan. 24, engineers plan to instruct NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to complete a final correction burn that will place it into its desired orbit, nearly 1 million miles away from the Earth at what is called the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or "L2" for short. Mathematically, Lagrange points are solutions to what …
The Sun emitted a mid-level solar flare on Jan. 20, 2022, peaking at 1:01 a.m. EST. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy. Flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to …
