VS’is one of the most delicate stages in the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, and it has just been completed. After a break decided on this weekend to allow the mission teams to recover but also to examine the proper functioning of the observatory’s energy supply systems, NASA began to stretch, one by one, the five layers. of the Webb telescope’s heat shield. A gigantic kite the size of a tennis court whose mission is to protect the telescope from heat and light coming from the Sun, but also from the Moon, the Earth and its own equipment.
The two large poles, right and left, on which are positioned the five thin layers of ultra-reflective material – a polymer film coated with aluminum – had, for their part, been successfully deployed during the night of New Year’s Eve, between 7:30 p.m. and 4:13 a.m. (Paris time). But, in order to be able to fully play its role, the sun visor still had to have its five layers perfectly stretched so that there is no contact zone between them capable of constituting a thermal bridge liable to reduce its effectiveness.
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“The tension phase of the layers of the sun visor is particularly delicate, because there are complex interactions between the structures, the tension mechanisms, the cables and the membranes,” James Cooper, Webb’s sun visor manager, said on Monday. for NASA. “It was the most difficult part to do on the ground, so it’s great that everything is going so well today”, he added after the success of the operation for the first three layers of the heat shield . The last two were, in turn, successfully adjusted on Tuesday.
This is it: we’ve just wrapped up one of the most challenging steps of our journey to #UnfoldTheUniverse.
With all five layers of sunshield tensioning complete, about 75% of our 344 single-point failures have been retired! pic.twitter.com/P9jJhu7bJX
– NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 4, 2022
Another 330,000 km of travel
This excellent news follows another one unveiled at the end of last week. Thanks to the precision of the launch of the telescope operated by Ariane 5, large quantities of fuel which could have been used to adjust the trajectory of the observatory were saved. So much so that instead of the minimum five years of operation initially planned, the US space agency assured that Webb would have enough fuel to operate at least ten years.
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However, the mission teams are not yet at the end of their sentence. The next step will consist in deploying the tripod which serves as a support for the secondary mirror of the telescope (74 centimeters in diameter) so as to position it in front of its gigantic primary mirror made of 18 segments (6.5 meters in diameter in total), again partially folded origami style. In addition, Webb has not yet reached its destination since it still has more than 330,000 kilometers to travel to reach the point of Lagrange 2 where it will settle permanently to observe, finally, our universe.