Engineers activate the file James Webb Space Telescope Upgrade your power system to better cope with the real-world space environment, and chill the engines a little more than expected before proceeding with the final deployment of the observatory’s critical solar canopy on Monday.
Squeezing five thin layers of the sun canopy, gently pulling them together with motor-driven cables running through multiple coils, will likely take three days, said Bill Ochs, NASA’s project manager. But by Monday evening, three of the five layers were already in shape, and the last two were waiting for a puff on Tuesday.
A five-layer sun visor for the James Webb Space Telescope seen during testing at the Northrop Grumman manufacturing facility in Redondo Beach, California.
NASA
“I always tell people that the best cure for surgery is boredom,” he said. “And that’s what we hope for the next three days. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief when we reach stress level 5. But I don’t expect drama. “
Internet and Most expensive science probe Was always released With a lot of fanfare on top of the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket on Christmas Day, it enters orbit around the Sun a million miles from Earth.
Designed to capture infrared light from the first stars and galaxies after the Big Bang, Webb is very complex. But in addition to the small growth issues common to all new spacecraft, Ochs said the $ 10 billion observatory is undergoing initial activation as planned.
“We’re still in the process of meeting them with a telescope,” he told reporters on a morning teleconference. “All satellites will always be slightly different in orbit from Earth, and it takes time to find out and understand their characteristics.
“This is a large part of what we did last week and we are still making great progress on our commissioning schedule.”
The telescope’s solar array was deployed at scheduled times after the spacewalk, two trajectory correction beams were performed, the high gain antenna was not stretched out and pointed towards Earth, and the two platforms holding the solar dome membranes were rotated in this position.
A retractable tower raised Webb’s main mirror and instruments three feet above the still folded sunscreen, providing extra space and insulation from the heat generated by the spacecraft’s electronics. Then a “pulse damper” was activated to neutralize the small forces transmitted by the solar wind.
After removing the protective covers, two overlapping arms appeared. Extension from solar roof platforms On New Years Eve, the Kapton membranes returned to their kite shape.
“Obviously, the levels of tension are the next big step we are taking,” Ochs said. “By the time we end tensions in all five grades, we will have retired somewhere between 70 and 75 percent of the 344 individual points of failure that were discussed before the appointment.”
He was referring to the number of non-redundant machines and mechanisms required for countless Webb deployments that have no backups if something goes wrong. They should all just work.
An art print of the Webb telescope with its sun shadows and its entire optical system has been published.
NASA
Sunscreen is needed to block the heat from the sun, and the 21.3-foot-wide Webb main mirror and instruments have cooled to nearly minus 400 degrees, cooling enough to register the faint infrared light of early stars and galaxies that ignites after Big Bright.
To reach extremely low temperatures, each layer must be stretched using motorized cables that run through several rolls, a process that also lifts and separates the films to allow thermal gaps to dissipate.
That latest stress was taken off over the weekend to give engineers a break from a busy first week of deployment and then evaluate the performance of Webb’s five-panel solar panel and its battery system.
Ultimately, factory settings governing solar panel production needed to be adjusted to reflect the actual temperatures Webb experiences in space. At the same time, the telescope was reoriented slightly to cool the six motors needed to tighten the visor layers.
“Everything is fine and working fine now,” said Amy Lo, a systems engineer at Webb for a major contractor Northrop Grumman. “The observatory was never in danger and we never really needed electricity. … Rebalancing the matrix gives us a certain margin (against) the expected increase in energy that we will need in the future. “
As for the engines, Luo said they never went out of range, they were just a little warmer than ideal. And for safety reasons, Webb was rerouted on Sunday to improve cooling, and “we now have a lot of temperature headroom.”
Bill Harwood has continuously covered the US space program since 1984, first as head of the United Press International office at Cape Canaveral and now as a consultant to CBS News. It has covered 129 Space Shuttle missions, all interplanetary missions since Voyager 2 passed through Neptune, and dozens of commercial and military launches. Harwood, of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is a dedicated amateur astronomer and co-author of Communications Verification: The Last Flight of Space Shuttle Columbia.
