It will take about five days to deploy the James Webb Space Telescope's fragile sunshade in a complex and high-risk procedure.
The five-layer sunshade, the size of a tennis court, is required to block out the sun and cool Webb's optics and instruments to within 50 degrees of absolute zero, or minus-370 Fahrenheit. Only then will the telescope be able to register the faint infrared light from the first generation of stars and galaxies.
The sunshade was carefully folded up before launch and the two pallets holding its Kapton membranes, all pinned in place, was rotated upward against the body of the spacecraft to fit inside the nose cone of its Ariane 5 rocket. and following two flawless trajectory correction thruster firings, commands were uploaded to rotate the first pallet back down on the forward side of Webb's primary mirror.
Assuming no problems with the pallets, a motorized tower will be extended Wednesday, raising Web's mirror and instrument assembly 48 inches away from the spacecraft's support section, or bus. That will isolate the optics from the heat generated by electronic gear positioned below the sunshade on the"hot side" of the spacecraft.
Over the next two days, motor-driven cables running through dozens of pulleys will be tightened, separating the layers and pulling them taut, ensuring a slight gap between each layer to allow heat to radiate outward to the sides."The sunshield alone has 90 cables in it, that if you strung them end to end would be almost a quarter mile in length," said Paul Geithner, a deputy project manager."And that's for pulling out the membranes and tensioning them. ...
After the sunshade is fully unfurled, flight controllers will turn their attention to Webb's primary and secondary mirrors to complete the post-launch deployment sequence.
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