After its Christmas Day launch, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has started to successfully deploy on the way to its perch 1 million miles from Earth.
After its Christmas Day launch, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has started to successfully deploy on the way to its perch 1 million miles from Earth.The deployment of the $10 billion telescope is one of the riskiest parts of its mission. Getting through this phase will pave the way for the JWST's important science to come.
The first three layers of the five-layer sun shield deployed Monday, with the final two successfully tensioned on Tuesday. "This is a really big moment," JWST project manager Bill Ochs said after the sun shield was fully tensioned. Now that all five layers of the sun shield are through tensioning, the telescope is about 70%–75% of the way through the 344 single points of failure that could spell major trouble for the telescope.The JWST's next big event is the deployment of its secondary mirror used to reflect light back to its large gold-coated primary mirror.If all goes according to plan with its commissioning and deployments, the JWST should start science operations toward the middle of the year.
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