IT House January 5 news, NASA announced on the official website that the james Webb telescope's five-layer sunshade has been successfully deployed, marking the completion of the telescope's most complex deployment.
"This is a very important moment," Bill Ochs, JWST program manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told the mission team after the deployment was complete. "I just want to congratulate the whole team. We still have a lot of work to do, but deploying the sunshade is really a big success. ”
IT House learned that the James Webb telescope was too large to be launched directly into space, so it needed to be deployed after launch. The deployment relies on hundreds of mechanisms and moving parts, and everything must be done correctly for it to work properly. During this process, there are up to 344 single points of failure, without any backups, which must be performed as designed or the entire task could be compromised.
Unfolded to the size of a tennis court, these sunshades are made of a polyimide film called Kapton that shields the instruments on board the space telescope from sunlight, cooling it to minus 223 degrees Celsius, just 50 degrees above absolute zero. This environment is critical for the Weber Space Telescope to probe infrared rays and observe thermal radiation from distant objects.
The deployment of the sunshade took more than a week to complete, which was a bit longer than originally planned. NASA tentatively scheduled the process to take about 6 days, but the telescope team paused for a while over the New Year's weekend to take a break and take a closer look at the data they received from the spacecraft. Due to some unexpected temperature readings and equipment issues, they also have to solve some problems.
The first problem is a small problem with solar arrays. Factory presets for solar arrays limit their power output, but NASA has rebalanced the arrays based on the temperatures they encounter in space and now has enough capability to function properly.
Another problem related to the motors used to release the sunshade and help tighten the layers, which operated at a little higher temperatures than the team expected, so the engineers slightly adjusted the orientation of the telescope to reduce sunlight exposure, helping to cool the motor before planned use.