One of the most important deployment steps is in the books.
The observatory unfurled its huge sun shield on Friday, carefully unfolding the five-layer structure by sequential deployment of two booms.
It's bright like a diamond. The mission team members said that the sun shield had taken on a diamond shape after deployment.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope mission is live.
The James Webb Space Telescope works in pictures.
With the successful deployment of our right sun shield mid-boom, or arm, the sun shield has now taken on a diamond shape in space. Next up: tensioning the sun shield layers.
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The sun shield is one of the most complex features of the telescope. The sun shield will help detect such signals by reflecting solar energy away from the instruments.
The shield is too large to fit inside the protective payload of any currently operational rocket. It was designed to launch in a very small configuration and unfold once in space.
The deployment is a multistep process with many different failure points that could sink the mission.
"Webb's sun shield assembly includes 140 release mechanisms, approximately 70 hinge assembly, eight deployment motors, bearings, springs, gears, about 400 pulleys and 90 cables, totaling 1,312 feet 400 m," said the engineer.
The deployment of Sunshield began on Tuesday when the two pallets that hold the structure were lowered. Additional steps were taken over the next few days. The cover that protected the sun shield was released by the observatory on Thursday.
The cover complicated Friday's activities because the team delayed boom deployment by a few hours to make sure that the cover was fully rolled up.
Patrick Lynch, deputy chief of the communications office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wrote in a post Friday that switches that should have indicated that the cover rolled up did not do so.
Secondary and tertiary sources confirmed that it had. The temperature data showed that the sun shield cover was being used to block sunlight from a sensor and the motion of the sun shield cover release devices was consistent with that.
The port was deployed mid-boom at 1:30 p.m. The activity ended at 4:49 p.m. on Friday, Lynch wrote. The time is 2149 GMT. The starboard mid-boom was extended at 6:31 p.m. It was done by around 10:00 p.m. Lynch wrote in another post.
The sun shield deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope takes so long.
The unfurling of the sun shield is a huge milestone, so the team members are likely breathing a sigh of relief after Friday's success. The mission team wants to finish the sun shield work over the weekend, but they need to bring the Kapton layers up to the proper tension.
After that is done, the focus will be on the secondary mirror and primary mirror. The tasks are expected to be completed by January 7, but deployment timelines are flexible so don't be alarmed if that target isn't met.
The main deployment phase will end if the mirrors are locked into their proper place. The next major milestone will be an engine burn, which will be performed 29 days after the launch, and will place the satellite into a position to travel to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2.
After the observatory arrives at L2, the team will still have a lot of work to do. They'll have to align the 18 segments of the primary mirror so they work together as a single light-collecting surface, and calibrate the telescope's four scientific instruments.
In the summer of 2022, regular science operations are expected to start. For at least five years after that, he will study some of the universe's first stars and the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets.
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