James Webb Space Telescope: Waiting for the Light

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Employees transported a mirror segment. The components were delivered to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in specially built transport canisters by their manufacturer, Ball Aerospace in the US state of Colorado. Each mirror is 1.32 meters wide. Overall, they result in a light-collecting surface that is six times the size of the mirror of the Hubble space telescope.

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Before building and testing the right instruments, a replacement version of the JWST optics called Optical Telescope Element Simulator was exposed to space-like conditions in the Space Environment Simulator at Goddard Space Flight Center. Golden thermal blankets envelop a system that provides support and heat control. This also includes panels with liquid nitrogen, which can keep the simulator’s temperature at around minus 170 degrees Celsius. This is supposed to simulate the temperature extremes that the telescope will experience beyond Earth.

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100 days of cryogenic tests should ensure that the JWST can withstand the conditions in the vacuum of space. The experiment took place in Chamber A, a huge room for heat and vacuum testing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The test chamber is the largest of its kind in the world and is protected by a door that weighs 40 tons and is 12.2 meters wide. In the 1960s the chamber was used to test equipment for the Apollo lunar missions.

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A technician carefully handled the gold foil that wrapped the instruments during the cryogenic tests in the Space Environment Simulator. These intensive and repeated tests were designed to ensure that the James Webb Space Telescope will function when it reaches its destination in space. Because as soon as it starts, scientists have nothing to offer except software corrections should something go wrong. “It’s definitely a complex observatory. And it’s a telescope that we can’t maintain like the Hubble Space Telescope, ”says Knicole Colon. “But we built a lot of redundancy into the mechanical systems of the JWST, and everyone involved took great care to test and check even the smallest aspects.”

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