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This December, an Ariane 5 rocket will launch from Kourou, French Guiana carrying the most complicated telescope ever developed — the joint NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

Following separation from the Ariane 5 second stage, James Webb will spend the next month deploying all of its instruments, mirrors, and structural systems that will be used for scientific observations.

For James Webb, commissioning is an extremely important process that the entire telescope team will monitor?

To gain insight into James Webb’s commissioning process and what the process will be like for the team, NASASpaceflight spoke with Keith Parrish, James Webb’s Observatory Manager and Commissioning Lead?

It’s a really fast compressed time period from the time that James Webb leaves the ground to it getting on orbit.”.

That’s where we will actually use Webb’s thrusters to take out any of the errors that Ariane 5 gave us.

After this, perhaps the most critical aspect of James Webb’s mission is up next — deployments.

Next up is the deployment of James Webb’s 6.5 m diameter mirror — one of the largest mirrors ever flown into space, and the most complex space telescope mirror ever built

“So our telescope consists of our primary mirror, which is made of eighteen individual mirror segments

Then, we have a secondary mirror

That secondary mirror is actually what takes in all the light that gets collected by the main mirror and puts the light down into our cameras and our instrument systems.  The secondary mirror is kind of mounted on a tripod that is broken up into different links and folded back onto the primary mirror

So we fold the secondary mirror out and then we fold out the two wings of the primary mirror.”

“Somewhere around the 10 to 14-day range, we feel like we will have the primary and secondary mirror fully deployed,” Parrish said

NASASpaceflight recently spoke with James Webb’s Optical Telescope Element Manager about the mirror’s systems and complexity

Next, the James Webb mirror team will start working on aligning each of the 18 individual mirror segments

For James Webb and its teams back on Earth, the next step in commissioning is L2 orbital insertion

That’s where they’ll use one of the cameras to actually retrieve what we call the wavefront, which is really an optical metric for how aligned the telescope is

The James Webb Space Telescope is folded to fit inside its rocket

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) November 12, 2021

At this point, the sunshield has allowed James Webb to cool to its expected temperatures for observations

But how does James Webb cool some of its instruments, and how do the instrument teams work to adapt their instruments to the temperatures

After this, James Webb gets turned over to the instrument teams

The four instruments onboard the James Webb Space Telescope

This electrical redundancy fills a role that wasn’t possible for a large part of James Webb — you can’t be backups for every system on board

James Webb is currently slated to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana on December 18, 2021

(Lead image: Engineers inspect the secondary mirror of James Webb following a deployment test. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn)