The joint NASA\/ESA\/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has successfully inserted itself into its orbit at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), doing so at 2:05 pm EST (19:05 UTC) on January 24, 2022. The insertion into L2 orbit signifies the end of the observatory\u2019s immensely complex deployment process and the beginning of the telescope\u2019s commissioning activities.<\/p>\n
The orbit insertion maneuver began at 2pm EST (19:00 UTC), lasted for five minutes, and added 1.6 meters per second velocity to Webb to send it into its proper orbit.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
UPDATE \u2014 January 24th at 7:30 pm EST<\/p>\n
James Webb teams and engineers have confirmed that the burn to insert the observatory into a Halo orbit around Lagrange Point 2 appears to have been completely nominal.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis afternoon our team fired what we call our station keeping thruster. They fired that thruster for five minutes and we put about 1.5 m\/s in, which pretty much caps off all of our mid-course correction maneuvers along the way (to L2),\u201d said JWST observatory commissioning manager Keith Parrish in a NASA media teleconference.
\nAdditionally, teams completed numerous other tasks throughout the week leading to orbit insertion.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got all of our mirrors out of their launch configuration [this week],\u201d added Parrish. \u201cThe spacecraft team has continued to put the spacecraft through all of its paces, and the flight operations team, mission operations team, and all of our engineer teams have really become comfortable with operating Webb and continuing to get to know it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAlso in the past few days, we\u2019ve gotten our high-speed data system up and running. We can now transmit at the high data rates we need to get all that awesome science data back down to the ground when we start doing science.\u201d
\n\u201cThe last 30 days have been absolutely remarkable, and we\u2019ve got it behind us and it\u2019s an incredible accomplishment by the entire team,\u201d Parrish said.<\/p>\n
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