The $10bn telescope was finished years late at a cost far higher than planned, but was finally launched on Christmas Day and is already more than halfway towards its destination approximately one million miles from Earth.
This initial deployment phase sparked anxiety in the teams of engineers that designed it as it had 344 single points of failure when it left the Earth and no way to correct any physical problems should anything go wrong. The most complicated and critical task, unrolling and stretching out its tennis-court-sized sunshield, was completed last week.
This included pins that had to release, latches to lock into place and a host of other mechanisms that needed to perform as planned.
With the full deployment of its 6.4 metre, gold-coated primary mirror over the weekend, Nasa has confirmed that the satellite is now ready to begin preparing for its main mission.
The satellite is a joint effort with Nasa, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the...