Engineers have made considerable progress in checking off NASA’s James Webb
Space Telescope’s final series of tests. Three big milestones have recently
been completed, bringing the world’s most complex and powerful space science
telescope ever built much closer to being fully prepared for its million-mile
journey to orbit. These three testing milestones are outlined below:
Deployable Tower Assembly Testing: Completed
This telescoping tower helps Webb maintain its necessary super cool
operating temperatures by separating its mirrors and instruments from the
comparatively warmer Sun-facing side and spacecraft bus. When fully
deployed, the tower reaches ten feet in length, which also gives the
observatory’s sunshield just enough room to unfold its complex mechanisms.
Recently this tower was fully extended for the very last time in testing,
just as it would once in space. Testing teams then lowered the tower and
locked it into place to prepare for launch later this year. The next time
this tower will deploy will be when Webb is in space.
AOS (Aft Optics Subsystem) Cover: Removed
Webb’s “lens cap” has been removed! A technician can be seen carefully
removing what’s known as Webb’s aft optics subsystem cover. This important
piece of protective equipment has kept the observatory’s instruments clean,
contaminant-free, and safe from stray light while it was assembled and fully
prepared for flight. Now that launch is so close, the cover has been removed
to allow engineers freedom to continue packing up the rest of the
observatory into its flight-like formation.
Unitized Pallet Structure: Stowed for Launch
Webb’s tennis court-sized sunshield folds up perfectly to rest on what is
known as a unitized pallet structure. These long support structures are part
of the observatory’s complex folding mechanism that allows it to just barely
fit inside an Ariane 5 rocket for launch. Now that Webb’s lens cap has been
removed, engineers were free to finish the process of folding the pallets
upward into their final configuration for launch. In the accompanying
picture, Webb’s pallet structures can be seen partially lifted, but they
have since been fully raised and locked in place for launch later this year.
The testing was conducted in a clean room at Northrop Grumman in Redondo
Beach, California.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be the world’s premier space science
observatory when it launches in 2021. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar
system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the
mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb
is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European
Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
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Space & Astrophysics