The Webb observatory has flawlessly unfurled its mirrors and sunshield — but more steps are needed before the science can begin
“The Webb deployments have been perfect,” says Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division in Washington DC.
The US$10-billion observatory still faces many significant tasks, such as aligning its mirror segments and calibrating its 4 scientific instruments. But it has finished the riskiest engineering moves, without which it would have been inoperable. Those include deploying a kite-shaped, tennis-court-sized sunshield to shade the telescope from the Sun’s heat, and positioning its primary and secondary mirrorsPhotons are now bouncing between Webb’s mirrors, making it an operational observatory.
“I think I was just nervous about deploying something big and floppy,” Hertz says. No other space observatory has had such a shield, so it is “new and unfamiliar”, he adds.Any step could have failed dramatically, but none did. Webb pulled the last of its sunshield layers into the correct tension on 4 January. “There was a lot of joy — a lot of relief,” said Hillary Stock, an engineer with Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, which designed and built the sunshield.
Other successful deployments during the past two weeks include swinging out a radiator that will funnel excess heat away from the telescope’s scientific instruments and dump it into space.Next up, Webb will begin tweaking the positions of the primary mirror’s 18 segments to align them to properly focus light that they collect. The telescope also continues to cool down towards its operating temperature of around 40 °C above absolute zero, or –233 °C.
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