Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain Snooze
"To work together as a single mirror, the telescope’s 18 primary mirror segments need to match each other to a fraction of a wavelength of light – approximately 50 nanometers. To put this in perspective, if the Webb primary mirror were the size of the United States, each segment would be the size of Texas, and the team would need to line the height of those Texas-sized segments up with each other to an accuracy of about 1.5 inches."
I'm thinking that's impressive accuracy even if it is in inches.
blogs.nasa.gov |
It's decent but not amazing. The amazing part is that they can achieve that level of precision and repeatability in such a thermally hostile environment. It's easy in a temperature-controlled clean room.