A NASA employee records victory on her cell phone.

© Bill Ingalls

Washington – The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched this Christmas, has ended its two-week phase with the appearance of its last mirror plate, and is now soon ready to explore the universe. “The final wing has been revealed,” NASA announced on Twitter on Saturday. The team is now working on “holding the wing in place,” a process that takes several hours.

“Before we celebrate, we still have a lot to do,” NASA continued. The telescope is only ready for use when the last installation is successful.

An Ariane 5 rocket, the successor to the legendary Hubble telescope, is carried into space from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana on Christmas Day. The James Webb Telescope is set to explore the early days of the universe 13 billion years ago, and thus a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

complex and dangerous process

Because the telescope was too large for an Ariane 5 rocket, it had to be folded up before launch. Detection in space was a complex and risky process, which caused a lot of concern to NASA officials in advance.

The telescope, named after a former US space agency administrator, was jointly developed by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the University of Cologne and several German companies also participated in the conference. (WHAT/AFP)