U.S. scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said on Sunday they had removed the lens cap from NASA's Wide-Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the first basic step to see the first images from WISE.
"The cover floated away as we planned," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at JPL, headquartered in Pasadena, Los Angeles.
"Our detectors are soaking up starlight for the first time," Irace said in a news release.
Last Wednesday, engineers sent a command to fire pyrotechnic devices that released nuts holding the cover in place. Three springs were then free to push the cover away and into an orbit closer to the Earth than that of the spacecraft.
Scientists and engineers are now busy adjusting the spacecraft speed to match the rate of a scanning mirror.
The telescope will perform the most detailed infrared survey of the entire sky to date. Its millions of images will expose the dark side of the cosmos -- objects, such as asteroids, stars and galaxies that are too cool or dusty to be seen with visible light, according to JPL officials.
The telescope will survey the entire sky one-and-a-half times in the next nine months, and its primary mission will end when the infrared
telescope goes out of focus as its critical coolant evaporates away.
The mission's "first-light" images of the sky will be released to the public in about a month, after the 16-inch telescope and four infrared detector arrays with one million pixels each have been fully calibrated.
The telescope was launched on Dec. 14 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Once it was thoroughly checked out in space, it was ready to "flip its lid" and blow off the cover that served as the top to a thermos- like bottle that chilled the instrument.
The cover kept everything cool on the ground by sealing a vacuum space into the instrument chamber. In the same way that thermos bottles use thin vacuum layers to keep coffee warm or iced tea cold, the vacuum space inside telescope stopped heat from getting in.
To take still images on the sky as it orbits around the Earth, the telescope will use a scan mirror to counteract its motion. Light from the
moving telescope's primary mirror will be focused onto the scan mirror, which will move in the opposite direction at the same rate.
This allows the mission to take "freeze-frame" snapshots of the sky every 11 seconds -- about 7,500 images a day, JPL officials said.