26/01/2022
Thirty days after it was launched, the James Webb telescope has arrived at the position in space where it will observe the Universe.
The Lagrange Point 2, as it's known, is a million miles (1.5 million km) from Earth on its nightside.
Webb was finally nudged into an orbit around this location thanks to a short, five-minute thruster burn.
Controllers back on Earth will now spend the coming months tuning the telescope to get it ready for science.
Key tasks include switching on the observatory's four instruments, and also focusing its mirrors - in particular, its 6.5m-wide segmented primary reflector.
"There's a pretty intensive effort to take all of those 18 segments from their current state and get them to act as one big mirror, and also to get the secondary mirror into its optimised condition," explained Charlie Atkinson, the chief engineer on Webb at Northrop Grumman, the American aerospace company that co-led the telescope's development with the US space agency (Nasa).
"We do this using the science images, which is why we need to get the science instruments activated and checked out with some initial calibration work," he told BBC News.
