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The most powerful telescope ever launched into space is nearing the end of a meticulous assembly process that has kept astronomers nervous for weeks.

Her Christmas morning launchThe James Webb Space Telescope has made all the right moves. It is now entering the final phase of the complex deployment phase.

In these final steps, two panels on either side of the telescope’s array of 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors folded back during launch should snap into place to complete Webb’s honeycomb-like reflector. The 21-foot-wide mirror sends light from the cosmos to a secondary mirror and then reflects the light onto the telescope’s primary infrared sensor.

Turning on the mirrors is a crucial milestone in using the telescope for scientific research on the Big Bang, exoplanets, black holes and our solar system. Once completed, NASA rates the telescope as “fully deployed.”

When will the Webb telescope turn on and how can I watch it?

The opening phase of the telescope is expected to be completed Saturday morning after the right side panel of the three remaining mirrors of the mirror segment is fixed in place. The left side completed its distribution on Friday, in a process that took five and a half hours.

On Saturday, engineers will instruct the telescope to release a series of latches that hold the panel in place during launch. Then, over the course of about five minutes, the panel will slowly open so that the three hexagonal mirrors are comfortably mosaicked with the other 15 mirrors.

During the operation, NASA Livestream on NASA TV and YouTube Saturday starts at 9:00 ET. It will show mission managers monitoring deployment from the flight control room of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the telescope’s central operations center. The distribution is expected to end a few hours later, around 13:30.

But you won’t be able to see what’s going on inside the telescope itself.

Why is there no camera in the telescope?

Rockets and some spacecraft carry onboard cameras so engineers on Earth can monitor their behavior in space. As such, engineers can be expected to install cameras with 344 “points of failure” on the James Webb Space Telescope, the most expensive and technically complex observatory ever launched into space.

Think again.

There is no monitoring camera in the telescope. Instead, engineers rely on switches, sensors and motors to monitor their health during deployment.

NASA abandoned the idea of ​​incorporating security cameras into Webb due to technical complexities and risk. The new size and shape of the telescope – one side of the sun shield deflects enormous amounts of heat and sunlight, and the other instrument-heavy side basking in the cold darkness – will require multiple custom-built cameras. Wires and mounts for these cameras will add weight and risk to an already heavy telescope, the agency said. announced in a blog post.

“It’s not as easy as adding a doorbell camera or even a rocket camera,” said Paul Geithner, deputy project manager for the technical part of NASA’s Webb program.

What happened to the telescope so far?

Since Webb’s launch, engineers have completed more than a dozen key steps to bring the telescope to its final shape, including hundreds of moving parts such as switches, motors, pulleys and cables during the deployment phase. The process began less than 30 minutes after launch last month when Webb’s solar array was deployed—the only step captured on video as the telescope parted ways through space with its rocket with an onboard camera.

The telescope has since passed a number of milestones, succeeding in alleviating astronomers’ anxiety and quelling fears that a structure as complex as Webb will encounter obstacles along its millions of miles to stay in space. The telescope turned on, the antennae unfolded, its various limbs mechanically unfolded, and in its most technically complex milestone, it precisely stretched five times a sheet of tennis court-size plastic designed to shield the telescope’s ultra-sensitive camera sensors from the heat of the sun.

Why is telescope so important to scientists?

The Webb telescope was designed by astronomers to investigate a significant part of early cosmic history known as the dark ages.

Cosmologists estimate that the first stars appeared when the universe was only about 100 million years old. (13.8 billion years old today.) The most distant and oldest galaxy seen by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope has been dated to when the universe was older, 400 million years after the Big Bang. In the 300 million years that have passed, it is a mystery what happened while the universe was flying brightly, and how the Big Bang turned into a sky full of constellations and life.

The telescope will also help astronomers better study supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies and planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy.

To obtain these scientific observations, the Webb telescope relies on a primary mirror with a diameter of 6.5 meters, compared to the 2.4-meter mirror on Hubble. This gives it the ability to gather about seven times more light and therefore the ability to see further.

Another important difference is that it is equipped with cameras and other instruments that are sensitive to infrared or “heat” radiation. The expansion of the universe causes light that is normally in visible wavelengths to shift to longer infrared wavelengths that are not normally visible to the human eye.

Engineers had to invent 10 new technologies along the way to make the telescope more sensitive than Hubble. Overly optimistic schedule forecasts, occasional development crashes, and erratic cost reporting pushed the timeline into 2021, bringing the total cost to $10 billion.