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The James Webb Space Telescope completed the optical system alignment, which ensures that all scientific instruments receive focused images of distant stars.
Engineers will now begin calibrating the science instruments, which will be completed by summer.
The observatory is currently in the commissioning phase, which consists of two phases and lasts five months.
The first phase, during which a multi-stage adjustment of the optical system is carried out, takes three months.
First, the telescope, using the star HD 84406 as a test target, made a series of coarse and fine adjustments to the position of the primary and secondary mirror segments.
On April 28, NASA announced that the alignment of the James Webb optical system had been completed.
This conclusion was made after analyzing test images of a segment of the Milky Way satellite galaxy of the Large Magellanic Cloud
The images were obtained in the infrared range by the scientific instruments NIRCam, MIRI, NIRISS and NIRSpec, as well as the guidance sensor.
The engineers came to the conclusion that each of the devices correctly collects the radiation focused by all the mirrors from the observed targets.
Now the observatory team will move on to the stage of calibrating scientific instruments that have already cooled down to operating temperatures.
This process will take about two months before the scientific observation program kicks off in early summer and the first images are published.
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