The James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror is made up of 18 hexagonal segments. Now that the telescope is in space, mission managers need to perfectly align them so the segments work as one giant mirror.
NASA/Chris Gunn

詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜（James Webb Space Telescope, 简称JWST）的主镜由18面镜片组成。望远镜已经在太空中，任务管理人员需要将它们完美地对齐，这样各个部分就可以像一面巨大的镜子一样工作。
NASA(美国国家航空航天局, National Aeronautics and Space Administration，简称NASA)/Chris Gunn

The powerful new James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first starlight, a milestone for the $10 billion space observatory — but it's not yet sending home the kind of breathtaking vistas of the cosmos that astronomers hope to unveil this summer.

功能强大的新型詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜捕捉到了它的第一道星光，这是耗资100亿美元的航天天文台的一个里程碑——但它还没有把天文学家希望在今年夏天揭开的令人惊叹的宇宙景象发送回来。

That's because the telescope's 18 gold-coated, hexagonal mirror segments aren't yet perfectly aligned and are basically acting like separate telescopes.

这是因为该望远镜的18个镀金六边形镜片尚未完全对齐，他们基本上就像单独的望远镜。

When astronomers point the observatory at a bright single star, the mirror segments each capture a different vision of that one celestial obxt, and the images are all out of focus and distorted.

当天文学家将天文台指向一颗明亮的恒星时，每个镜片都捕捉到了该天体的不同景象，图像都失去了焦点并发生了扭曲。

One mosaic released by NASA, for example, looks like just a dark sky speckled with 18 little dots. Each dot is a different view of the same star, and each is labeled with the name of the mirror segment that captured it.

例如，美国国家航空航天局发布的一幅马赛克看起来就像是一片黑暗的天空，上面点缀着18个小点。每个点都是同一颗星的不同观测视角(的观测结果)，并且标有捕捉到它的镜片的名称。

Images like these are incredibly important as mission managers start to carefully adjust the position of each mirror segment to get them working as one giant mirror that's 21 feet across.

随着任务管理人员开始仔细调整每个镜片的位置，使其成为一个21英尺宽的巨型镜像，这样的图像变得极为重要。

"This amazing telescope has not only spread its wings, but it has now opened its eyes," says Lee Feinberg, Webb's optical telescope element manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who adds that all the initial results match their simulations and expectations. "It is still early, but we are very encouraged with what we are seeing."

李‧费恩伯格( Lee Feinberg)是位于格林贝尔特的NASA戈达德太空飞行中心(NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, 简称GSFC)的主管，他说，“这台令人惊叹的望远镜不仅展开了翅膀，而且现在已经睁开了眼睛。”他补充道，所有的初步结果都符合他们的模拟和预期。“虽然现在还为时过早，但是对于看到的结果，我们受到了非常大的鼓舞。”
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This mosaic shows images of the same star. Each is labeled with the name of the mirror segment that captured it. "Wing" refers to the two sides of the mirror assembly that unfolded in space.
NASA

这种马赛克展示了同一颗恒星的图像。每个观测结果附近标明了观测到该结果的镜片名称。“Wing” 指的是镜片在太空中展开的两侧。

NASA
So far there's no sign of any major flaw, like the one that troubled the Hubble Space Telescope before astronauts went up and fixed it. But Feinberg cautions that there's still plenty of work ahead. He thinks they won't know for sure that everything is OK until some fine-tuning that should occur in March.

迄今为止，还没有出现任何重大缺陷的迹象，比如之前宇航员上去修复困扰哈勃望远镜(Hubble Space Telescope, 位于地球的大气层之上的一个光学望远镜, 简称HST)的那个。但是费恩伯格提醒说道，将来仍然有大量的工作需要完成。他认为在3月份进行精确调整之前，他们无法确定是否一切正常。

The first light came into the telescope's main imager, a near infrared camera called NIRCam, early on the morning on Feb. 2. Scientists gathered at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore to watch and cheer.

2月2日清晨，第一束光进入了韦伯望远镜的主成像仪——一个名为NIRCam的近红外相机。科学家们聚集在巴尔的摩（Baltimore，美国马里兰州北部海港）的太空望远镜科学研究所（Space Telescope Science Institute, 简称STScI）观看并欢呼。

"The excitement of finally getting some light through the telescope onto NIRCam's detectors was really hard to express," says Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for NIRCam and regents' professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who has dedicated about 20 years of her life to this project. "This place was a giant celebration because the light had made it and we were super-duper happy."

Marcia Rieke是NIRCam的项目负责人，同时也是图桑市亚利桑那大学(University of Arizona)的天文学教授，她将生命中将近20年的光阴奉献给了这个项目。她说。“最终，一些光线投射到了NIRCam的探测器上，这种兴奋难以言表。这些光的出现使得我们非常欣喜，让太空望远镜科学研究所成为了盛大的庆典。”

The very first images were just a quick engineering check to make sure that nothing was blocking the path of light into the detector. "We got beautiful — at least beautiful to a person who has worked on NIRCam for a long time — images," says Rieke.

最初的图像只是一个快速的工程检查，以确保没有任何东西阻挡进入探测器的光路。“我们得到了美丽的成像——至少对于在NIRCam上长时间工作的人来说。” Rieke说道。

"After all these years, to actually see data when we are in zero gravity, in space, it is emotional," says Feinberg. "In the room, when we were looking at the data, people were really excited. But, you know, we still are being a little cautious because we still have things that we have to get through."

“在这么多年之后，当我们在太空的失重环境下真切地看到数据时，我们欢忻鼓舞。房间里，人们看着数据，群情鼎沸。但是你知道的，我们仍然有点谨慎，因为我们仍然有一些事情需要解决。”费恩伯格说道。

Nonetheless, Feinberg recalls that when he went home a few days after seeing those initial images, his wife said it was the first time she had seen him smiling since December. "We're all feeling energized by all this," he says.

尽管如此，费恩伯格回忆起他在观测到首批图像的几天后回到家，妻子说那是她从12月以来第一次看到他脸上出现微笑。“这一切让我们都感到精力充沛。”

The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Christmas Day, has been in the works for decades and was so over budget and so delayed that at one point, lawmakers in Congress tried to kill it. The telescope is so big that it had to be folded up to fit inside a rocket and then it unfurled itself out in space. The three-story-tall observatory is now parked in a special orbit around the sun that keeps it about a million miles away from Earth.

在圣诞节发射的詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜已经投入使用了几十年，由于预算过多，时间延误，国会议员一度试图扼杀它。韦伯望远镜太大了，必须折叠起来才能装进火箭，然后才能在太空中展开。这座三层楼高的天文台现在停在一个绕太阳运行的特殊轨道上，使它与地球保持约100万英里的距离。

Once it is fully operational, this telescope should be able to capture faint infrared light that has been traveling through space for almost the entire history of the universe, revealing what the first galaxies looked like after the Big Bang. It will also allow astronomers to probe the composition of the atmospheres of planets that orbit other stars, searching for combinations of gases that might indicate the possible presence of life.

一旦完全投入使用，这台望远镜应该能够捕捉到几乎在整个宇宙历史中一直在太空中传播的微弱红外光，揭示出宇宙大爆炸后第一批星系的样子。天文学家也将能够探测环绕其他恒星运行的行星大气的组成，寻找可能表明生命存在的气体组合。

Marshall Perrin, Webb deputy telescope scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, says that the mirrors' separate depictions of a single star showed up pretty close together in images taken with the camera, suggesting that the mirrors are already aligned reasonably well.

韦伯太空望远镜科学研究所副望远镜科学家Marshall Perrin说在相机拍摄的图像中，不同镜片对单一恒星的独立成像非常接近，这表明镜片已经很好地对齐了。

"It's a real testament to the care and the precision with which the observatory was put together on the ground and with how smoothly the ride to space went and all those deployments," says Perrin. "And that has put us in a great starting position to begin aligning these mirrors to act as one."

Perrin 说，“这不仅证明了该天文台在地面组装和部署时的稳定性和精确性，也表明其将来可以顺利前往太空部署的可行性。并且，这让我们处于一个很好的起点，开始对齐这些镜片，使得他们合而为一。”