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NASA technician giving the impression: "We still have a lot to do"
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BILL INGALLS / AFP
The James Webb space telescope, which was launched on Christmas Day, ended its two-week unfolding phase with the unfolding of a last mirror plate and is now soon ready for exploration of the universe.
"The last wing is now unfolded," said NASA on Twitter on Saturday.
The team is now working on »anchoring the wing in its place«, a process that takes several hours.
"Before we celebrate, we still have a lot to do," Nasa went on to explain.
The telescope is only ready for use when the last anchorage has been successful.
Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA's science missions, said he was "very emotionally moved."
An Ariane 5 rocket brought the successor to the legendary Hubble telescope into space from the spaceport in Kourou in French Guiana on Christmas Day.
The ten billion euro James Webb telescope is to explore the early days of the universe 13 billion years ago and thus only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Because the telescope was too big for the Ariane 5 rocket, it had to be folded up before launch.
The unfolding in space was then a complex and risky process, which had caused the NASA officials a lot in advance.
The riskiest operation happened earlier in the week when the tennis court-sized sun visor unfolded.
The telescope is expected to reach its destination, 1.6 million kilometers away, in another two weeks;
it has moved more than a million kilometers from Earth since its launch.
If everything continues to go well, scientific observations should begin this summer.
The telescope, named after a former director of the US space agency, was jointly developed by NASA, the European space agency Esa and the Canadian space agency CSA.
The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the University of Cologne and several German companies also took part.
sol / AFP / AP