NASA’s Webb Telescope Packs Its Sunshield Ready for an October Voyage

This year is turning out to be a good one for space enthusiasts , not only do we have a shiny new rover with it's pet helicopter on Mars but it's beginning to look like the long awaited launch of the James Webb Space Telescope might actually happen this year with the news that Its Sunshield has now been packed ready for its Million Mile Trip.

Fully deployed, the telescope’s sunshield measures almost 70 feet by 47 feet (21 meters by 14 meters). When stowed inside the rocket for launch, the folded sunshield will be packaged in a very confined area in between other structures of the observatory to accommodate the limited space inside the 18-foot (5.4-meter) diameter rocket fairing.

“There is nothing really analogous to what we are trying to achieve with the folding up of a tennis court-sized sunshield, but it is similar to packing a parachute,” said Jeff Cheezum, a lead sunshield design engineer at Northrop Grumman. “Just like a skydiver needs their parachute packed correctly in order to open perfectly and to successfully get back to Earth, Webb needs its sunshield to be perfectly stowed to ensure that it also opens up perfectly and maintains its shape, in order to successfully keep the telescope at its required operating temperature.”

With the successful completion of sunshield folding, the engineering team has prepared the sunshield for its complex deployment in space. The sunshield will unfold at the end of the telescope’s first week in space after launch, stretching out to its full size and then separating and tensioning each of its five layers. Testing for this unfolding and tensioning procedure was completed for the final time on Earth in December 2020.
www.nasa.gov...

Of course there's a long way to go and in the 6 months remaining any number of problems could set the launch back but as it's looking today that long long long wait could be nearly over.

a reply to: gortex
With Bill Gates desire to "block sunlight" to Earth due to "Global dumb-assery" I mean warming...

...the tinfoil in me, cant help but believe this will have secondary "testing" applications.

a reply to: BlueJacket

In real tin foil theory it won't make it to space..

a reply to: gortex

This is definitely a step in the right direction.

I can't believe it's been so long that packing up the mirror makes it to the news.

Today is a good day.

a reply to: gortex
Cheers-I can't wait to see what this scope shows us.

I am hoping it will be as big as the difference between pre-hubble and post hubble images of nebulae/galaxies,but for exoplanets.

I was recently reading an article by Michio Kaku,and the Webb telescope is one of the main reasons he believes we will soon detect alien life in the universe(think his estimate was within the next 100years).

If I understand correctly,we should be able to see much more detail on very distant planets-the sort that with todays tech we just get a few blurred pixels,if that.

As they already know the locations of quite a few exoplanets,I really hope the webb scope shows us more of those-maybe they will start with Proxima Centauri B which scientists believe to be very earth like and even have life.

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

I agree with Michio but think his time frame is way too pessimistic , assuming JWST launches and deploys as planned I'd be surprised if we didn't have indications of habitable worlds within the first couple of years of operation and perhaps spectrographical evidence for life before the end of the decade , I do believe JWST will be a game changer.

Spectroscopy will give us the Aliens.

originally posted by: gortex
a reply to: Silcone Synapse

Spectroscopy will give us the Aliens.

'bout darn time.

Definitely a game changer for the search.

originally posted by: gortex
Of course there's a long way to go and in the 6 months remaining any number of problems could set the launch back but as it's looking today that long long long wait could be nearly over.

Let's hope the long wait is almost over.

It's been called the The telescope that ate astronomy and I don't think that's much of an exaggeration. The linked article from 2014 says the projected cost was 5 billion dollars and was eating up all the resources which could be going to other astronomy projects. Now in 2021 the cost is at $10 billion and that's caused the even more other space astronomy projects to be canceled or put on hold.

It's a huge risk, with a lot of new, untried technologies at such a huge distance from Earth that a repair mission may not be possible or would itself require new technology. Which would be better, five projects of $2 billion each, or one project of $10 billion? At least with the 5 projects of $2 billion, if one fails, you've still got 4 other projects.

The telescope will rely on a host of untried technologies, ranging from its sensitive light-detecting instrumentation to the cooling system that will keep the huge spacecraft below 50 kelvin. And it will have to operate perfectly on the first try, some 1.5 million kilometres from Earth — four times farther than the Moon and beyond the reach of any repair mission. If the JWST — named after the administrator who guided NASA through the development of the Apollo missions — fails, the progress of astronomy could be set back by a generation.

With one $10 billion project, if it fails, we've got not much else because it's eaten up so much funding that could have gone to other proposed observatories

other proposed observatories, most of which have already been canceled or put on hold, including Terrestrial Planet Finder (2011), Space Interferometry Mission (2010), International X-ray Observatory (2011), MAXIM (Microarcsecond X-ray Imaging Mission), SAFIR (Single Aperture Far-Infrared Observatory), SUVO (Space Ultraviolet-Visible Observatory), and the SPECS (Submillimeter Probe of the Evolution of Cosmic Structure)

So let's hope everything works perfectly but even if the design is flawless, rocket launches themselves aren't without risk, so let's hope fate doesn't conspire to have the rare rocket launch failure occur on this particular mission.

a reply to: gortex

only like a decade behind schedule.