Engineers for the James Webb Space Telescope are in the midst of an intricate, three-month-long process of aligning the telescope’s 18 separate mirror segments to work together as one giant, high-precision 6.5-meter (21.3-foot) primary telescope mirror.
This process, called phasing, began in early February and includes seven different steps, which goes from taking the mirrors’ initial placements after they were deployed to doing a “coarse” and then “fine” alignment, and then making sure the mirror works with all four of Webb’s instruments and their various fields of view.
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