Quebec nurse had to clean up after husband's death in Montreal hospital
On a night she should have been mourning, a nurse from Quebec's Laurentians region says she was forced to clean up her husband after he died at a hospital in Montreal.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, designed to give the world an unprecedented glimpse of infant galaxies in the early stages of the universe, arrived at its gravitational parking spot in orbit around the sun on Monday, more than a million kilometres from Earth.
With a final five-minute, course-correcting thrust of its onboard rocket, Webb reached its destination at a position of gravitational equilibrium known as the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, arriving one month after launch, NASA officials said.
The thruster was activated by mission control engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, with radio signals confirming Webb was successfully "inserted" into its desired orbital loop around L2.
From there, Webb will follow a special "halo" path that keeps it in constant alignment with Earth but out of its shadow, as the planet and telescope circle the sun in tandem. The prescribed L2 orbit within the larger solar orbit thus enables uninterrupted radio contact, while bathing Webb's solar-power array in non-stop sunlight.
By comparison, Webb's 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits the Earth from 547 kilometres away, passing in and out of the planet's shadow every 90 minutes.
The combined pull of the sun and Earth at L2 - a point of near gravitational stability first deduced by 18-century mathematician Joseph-Louis Legrange - will minimize the telescope's drift in space.
But ground teams will need to fire Webb's thruster briefly again about once every three weeks to keep it on track, Keith Parrish, the observatory's commissioning manager from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told reporters on Monday.
Mission engineers are preparing next to fine-tune the telescope's primary mirror - an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal measuring 6.5 metres across, far larger than Hubble's main mirror.
Its size and design - operating mainly in the infrared spectrum - will allow Webb to peer through clouds of gas and dust and observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
These features are expected to usher in a revolution in astronomy, giving a first view of infant galaxies dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set the expansion of the known universe in motion an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.
Webb's instruments also make it ideal to search for signs of potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented exoplanets - celestial bodies orbiting distant stars - and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn's icy moon Titan.
It will take several more months of work to ready the telescope for its astronomical debut.
The 18 segments of its principal mirror, which had been folded together to fit inside the cargo bay of the rocket that carried the telescope to space, were unfurled with the rest of its structural components during a two-week period following Webb's launch on Dec. 25.
Those segments were recently detached from fasteners and edged away from their original launch position. They now must be precisely aligned - to within one-ten-thousandth the thickness of a human hair - to form a single, unbroken light-collecting surface.
Ground teams will also start activating Webb's various imaging and spectrographic instruments to be used in the three-month mirror alignment. This will be followed by two months spent calibrating the instruments themselves.
Mirror alignment will begin by aiming the telescope at a rather ordinary, isolated star, dubbed HD-84406, located in the Ursa Major, or "Big Dipper," constellation but too faint to be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
Engineers will then gradually tune Webb's mirror segments to "stack" 18 separate reflections of the star into a single, focused image, Lee Feinberg, Webb's optical telescope element manager at Goddard, said during Monday's NASA teleconference.
Alignment is expected to start next week when the telescope, whose infrared design makes it super-sensitive to heat, has cooled down enough in space to work properly - a temperature of about -240 degrees Celsius.
If all goes smoothly, Webb should be ready to begin making scientific observations by summer.
Sometime in June, NASA expects to make public its "early release observations," a 'greatest hits' collection of initial images used to demonstrate proper functioning of Webb's instruments during its commissioning phase.
Webb's most ambitious work, including plans to train its mirror on objects farthest from Earth, will take a bit longer to conduct.
The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp was the primary contractor.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Karishma Singh, Rosalba O'Brien and Kenneth Maxwell)
On a night she should have been mourning, a nurse from Quebec's Laurentians region says she was forced to clean up her husband after he died at a hospital in Montreal.
Cuba's foreign affairs minister has apologized to a Montreal-area family after they were sent the wrong body following the death of a loved one.
The federal government's proposed change to capital gains taxation is expected to increase taxes on investments and mainly affect wealthy Canadians and businesses. Here's what you need to know about the move.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is accusing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of welcoming 'the support of conspiracy theorists and extremists,' after the Conservative leader was photographed meeting with protesters, which his office has defended.
A North Bay, Ont., lawyer who abandoned 15 clients – many of them child protection cases – has lost his licence to practise law.
A Toronto couple are speaking out about their 'extremely dangerous' experience on board a sinking tour boat in the Dominican Republic last week.
Boeing said Wednesday that it lost US$355 million on falling revenue in the first quarter, another sign of the crisis gripping the aircraft manufacturer as it faces increasing scrutiny over the safety of its planes and accusations of shoddy work from a growing number of whistleblowers.
Members of the Bank of Canada's governing council were split on how long the central bank should wait before it starts cutting interest rates when they met earlier this month.
It's no secret that spring can be a tumultuous time for Canadian weather, and as an unseasonably mild El Nino winter gives way to summer, there's bound to be a few swings in temperature that seem out of the ordinary. From Ontario to the Atlantic, though, this week is about to feel a little erratic.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.
When identical twin sisters Kim and Michelle Krezonoski were invited to compete against some of the world’s most elite female runners at last week’s Boston Marathon, they were in disbelief.
The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
A family from Laval, Que. is looking for answers... and their father's body. He died on vacation in Cuba and authorities sent someone else's body back to Canada.
A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.