By Steve Gorman

(Reuters). NASA began Wednesday a lengthy and painful process to focus its James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched on Wednesday. The task will be finished in time so that the eye in space can start looking at the universe by the beginning of summer.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, Maryland) started mission control engineers with sending their first commands to actuators, tiny motors that position and fine tune the telescope’s main mirror slowly.

This primary mirror, which is composed of 18 sections of hexagonal gold-plated beryllium, measures 21 feet (4 inches) (6.5 meters) in diameter. Webb’s original Hubble Space Telescope, 30 years old, has the same size.

Following Webb’s Dec. 25 rocket launch, 18 of the segments were folded into one to be placed in the capsule that transported the telescope. They were then unfurled along with other structural elements during a period of two weeks.

These sections must now be separated from the fasteners which held them in position for launch. They should then be moved half an inch forward from their original configuration, a process that takes 10 days, before they can align to create a single light-collecting surface.

According to Lee Feinberg (Webb optical telescope element manager at Goddard), the alignment process will continue for three more months. He spoke by phone to Reuters.

Feinberg explained that aligning primary mirrors to create one big mirror is a way to ensure each mirror segment has the same thickness as a human hair.

He said, “All this forced us to invent things which had never been done before”, such as actuators that can move in an incremental manner at -400 Fahrenheit in vacuum.

In order to work together as an integrated optical system, Webb must align the secondary mirror of the telescope, which is smaller and designed to focus light collected by Webb’s primary lens on Webb’s camera.

Feinberg indicated that the telescope would have its first science images ready for public in May if everything goes according to plan. The remaining pictures will need to be processed over the next month, Feinberg explained.

NASA calls the telescope the world’s most important space-science observatory. The observatory, which costs $9 billion, is designed to see the universe in infrared. This allows it to look through the clouds of dust and gas that surround the stars. Hubble was primarily active at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths.

Webb has a power about 100 times greater than Hubble. This allows it to see objects from a wider distance and thus further back than Hubble.

Astronomers believe this will allow us to see a new view of the cosmos – it is only 100 million years since the Big Bang. This theoretical flashpoint was responsible for the explosion that began the expansion of our universe 13.8 billion years earlier.

NASA is leading the international partnership that created the telescope in collaboration with Canadian and European space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp (NYSE: ) was the principal contractor.