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Spreading its mirror wings was the telescope’s last big step in its complicated deployment.


NASA has pulled off the most technically audacious part of bringing its newest flagship observatory online: unfolding it.

On Saturday, Jan. 8, the operations team for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) announced that the observatory’s primary mirror had successfully unfolded its segments — the last major step of the telescope’s complicated deployment.

The moment was a euphoric moment of validation for the entire team. “We’re on an incredible high right now,” said Bill Ochs, JWST’s project manager, at a press conference. “Today represents the beginning of a journey for this incredible machine, to its discoveries that we’ll be making in the future.”

Solar Orbiter’s latest images shows the full Sun in unprecedented detail. They were taken on March 7, 2022, when the spacecraft was crossing directly between the Earth and Sun.

One of the images, taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) is the highest resolution image of the Sun’s full disc and outer atmosphere, the corona, ever taken.

Another image, taken by the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument represents the first full Sun image of its kind in 50 years, and by far the best one, taken at the Lyman-beta wavelength of ultraviolet light that is emitted by hydrogen gas.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) — Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, said on Friday it would invest S$1.5 billion ($1.1 billion) in Singapore over the next four years, the newest phase of a S$4.9 billion global investment plan.

When Dyson announced the global investment plan in 2020, it said the money would be divided between the company’s global head office in Singapore, its two campuses in Wiltshire, southern England, and the Philippines.

On Friday, it launched its new global headquarters in a restored power station in the Southeast Asian city-state, where it plans to hire more than 250 additional engineers and scientists.

Scientists have confirmed the speed of sound on Mars, using equipment on the Perseverance rover to study the red planet’s atmosphere, which is very different to Earth’s.

What they discovered could have some strange consequences for communication between future Martians.

The findings suggest that trying to talk in Mars’ atmosphere might produce a weird effect, since higher-pitched sound seems to travel faster than bass notes. Not that we’d try, since Mars’ atmosphere is unbreathable, but it’s certainly fun to think about!