Story at a glance
- The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed its sunshield.
- The massive shield is 70-feet-long and serves to protect the delicate instruments on the telescope from the light and heat from the sun, Earth and moon.
- Webb is the planet’s largest and most powerful telescope ever created.
NASA’s $10 billion James Webb telescope, which launched on Christmas, has successfully deployed its tennis-court sized sunshield in space.
The sunshield’s purpose is to protect the NASA observatory from light and heat emitted from the sun, Earth and moon. For the telescope to pick up on the faint infrared light it was designed to observe, its instruments must stay extremely cold, below minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit.
When the telescope launched, the sunshield was folded to fit inside the payload area of an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket’s nose cone, which the Webb team began to remotely unfold on Dec. 28.
“Unfolding Webb’s sunshield in space is an incredible milestone, crucial to the success of the mission,” said Gregory L. Robinson, Webb’s program director at NASA headquarters. “Thousands of parts had to work with precision for this marvel of engineering to fully unfurl. The team has accomplished an audacious feat with the complexity of this deployment – one of the boldest undertakings yet for Webb.”
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The eight-day-long deployment process involved the coordination of 139 of Webb’s 178 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, about 400 pulleys and 90 individual cables which together measured about a quarter of a mile in length, according to a release from NASA.
The Webb temporarily paused the shield’s deployment for a day to work on optimizing the telescope’s power system and tensioning motors, ensuring the instruments were in “prime condition” to roll out the massive sunshield.
Team members were able to finally tension and lock the 70-foot-long sunshield into place at 11:59 a.m. on Tuesday. The final “tensioning” process used numerous mechanical release devices which made up about half of the telescope’s 344 potential single-point failures, according to The Washington Post.
“This is the first time anyone has ever attempted to put a telescope this large into space,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “Webb required not only careful assembly but also careful deployments. The success of its most challenging deployment – the sunshield – is an incredible testament to the human ingenuity and engineering skill that will enable Webb to accomplish its science goals.”
Webb, the successor of the aging Hubble space observatory, will observe infrared light to help scientists learn more about space’s oldest stars and even be able to pick up some of the first light emitted from The Big Bang.
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