Webb telescope deployments complete as side mirrors rotate into place

A pallet holding three of the James Webb Space Telescope's 18 hexagonal mirror segments rotated into position and locked in place Saturday, filling out the observatory's 21.3-foot-wide primary mirror to wrap up the most complicated set of spacecraft deployments ever attempted.

Fourteen days after launch on Christmas Day and now 665,000 miles outbound from Earth, the right-side "wing" of Webb's iconic segmented mirror swung into place at 10:28 a.m. EST, prompting cheers and applause from elated scientists and engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

"We now have a fully deployed telescope," an engineer calmly reported to the team.