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That trick is hard enough when using radio telescopes connected to the mass of planet earth, with enormous wavelengths in comparison to what JWST is doing. It's position is known fairly accurately but even the telescope will undergo various vibrations from for instance the equipment on board and the course correction burns which will have a pretty significant effect on the satellite body.

The mirrors are dynamically deformed to correct for some errors, I don't think - but I also don't know for sure - if they are going to do long baseline tricks with the orbit, it would make good sense to do this for paralax shift measurements (which give you a good idea about the distance an object is at), but the orbit of the earth around the sun would be far more useful for that because it is so much larger.

Anyway, there are people on HN that are far more knowledgeable about this stuff than I am, I take it the designers and operators of the JWST are top in their fields and that anything interested laypeople can come up with has been debated, accepted or rejected a decade or more before this conversation, they're far from stupid, as evidenced by the incredible performance so far. Let's hope it stays that way and that the insertion burn goes well, that's the major scary thing that will happen next and the delta-v is nothing like the launch so I would assume that it will all go well but at the same time the telescope wasn't as fragile back then as it is now.




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