It has been announced that one of the main observing instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which opens new horizons by observing the universe deeper and further into the infrared region, has failed.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on its official blog on the 20th that it is in the process of preparing to operate the ‘Medium Resolution Spectrometer (MRS)’, one of the four observation methods of the ‘Middle Infrared Instrument’. (MIRI) the web telescope, friction between connected devices He said there is a growing problem.
The device includes a grating wheel that allows the scientist to select the wavelength, from short to long wavelengths, when making MRS mode observations.
The MRS mode is one of a total of 17 observing modes of the Webb telescope, and is known to be useful for observing light emitted from dust and molecules in the planet’s disk.
When this problem occurred in preparation for the MRS mode observation on the 24th of last month, NASA convened a review committee on the 6th of this month to discuss a solution.
Currently, all observing schedules related to the MRS mode have been suspended, and a plan is being sought to resume them as soon as possible.
The Webb telescope, with a total investment of $10 billion, is reported to be in good overall condition.
The other three observation methods of MIRI: mid-infrared imaging, corona imaging, and low resolution spectroscopy (LRS) are also operating normally and observations are continuing.
The Webb Telescope, launched at the end of December last year and located at the 2nd Lagrange point (L2), about 1.6 million km from Earth, took about six months of preparation and on July 12, the deepest telescope in the universe and Nebula Carina Five ‘first light’ images were released to test the observing performance and scientific observation began in earnest.
Since then, new observations such as the wheel galaxies, the rings of Jupiter, and images of exoplanets have been released one after the other to surprise scientists, and there were also results.
The Webb telescope, which has a 6.5-metre diameter main mirror and a shadow screen the size of a tennis court, is expected to continue observing activities for more than 20 years.
The mission was originally five years, but expectations have risen as the space deployment process went very smoothly.
However, it is not without any life-threatening danger to the Webb telescope, as one of the 18 gold-coated beryllium mirrors that make up the main mirror (C3) is struck by a small meteoroid.
It is fortunate that device abnormalities associated with MRS mode find a solution through remote control, etc., but unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which was repaired in outer space, it is not used in low Earth orbit and cannot send a space shuttle, so it may remain as a permanent defect. .
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