The James Webb Space Telescope has deployed all of its mirrors and is now 850,000 miles into its million-mile journey through space, NASA revealed.
The $10 billion Webb telescope has been in space for nearly a month, and is close to being at the end of its deployment - something that happened faster than expected.
Due to its size - larger than a tennis court when fully deployed - Webb had to be folded up to fit inside the Ariane 5 rocket when it launched on Christmas Day 2021, from the European Space Agency spaceport in French Guiana.
It has been slowly unfolding as it makes its way to the second Lagrangian point (L2), an area of balanced gravity between the sun and Earth where it will sit for a decade.
'All 18 primary mirror segments and the secondary mirror are now fully deployed!' NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in a tweet posted on Wednesday.
'Congratulations to the teams that have been working tirelessly since launch to get to this point. Soon, Webb will arrive at its new home, L2!'
The James Webb Space Telescope has deployed all of its mirrors and is now 850,000 miles into its million-mile journey through space, NASA revealed
The famous golden mirror, which will be used by astronomers for more than a decade, is made up of 18 individual hexagonal segments.
Each of these segments is controlled by seven actuators that allow for precise movement and focusing. They are now all in their deployed positions.
This has happened several days earlier than scheduled, and NASA predicts that the first images from the telescope may be available in May.
The US-space agency began work deploying the mirror segments on January 12, and planned for the project to take 10 days - but completed it in a week.
However, despite this, the telescope isn't ready to begin observations, as there now needs to be 'painstaking' fine tuning work to ensure every mirror position is turned to such a way to it creates a single ultra-powerful mirror.
In total this process is expected to take about three months, after which it will be a case of testing, calibrating other equipment and cooling the observatory down.
James Webb Space Telescope, which blasted off from Guiana Space Centre on Christmas Day, has now fully deployed its 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror.
Aligning the primary mirror segments to form one large mirror means each segment 'is aligned to one-five-thousandth the thickness of a human hair'.
The telescope's smaller, secondary mirror, designed to direct light collected from the primary lens into Webb's camera and other instruments, must also be aligned to operate as part of a cohesive optical system.
Once the fine tuning is done, James Webb is expected to capture its first science images in May, which will then be processed over about another month before they can be released to the public in June.
It still has one major development milestone to complete - a trajectory burn to insert it into the L2 orbit - a million miles from the Earth.
It will sit on the side of the planet opposite the sun, and observe the oldest parts of the universe, the youngest stars, and distant worlds.
It is set to complete this final movement and arrive in
