The sun shield was successfully deployed on Tuesday by engineers during testing at a facility in Redondo Beach, Calif.
Chris Gunn is from NASA.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope passed a major milestone when it successfully deployed its enormous sun shield, which will allow the floating space observatory to peer into the most distant reaches of the universe.
Team members in the Mission Operations Control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore clapped and cheered as they finished adjusting the final layer of the sun shield shortly before noon on Tuesday.
The team celebrated and the project manager said the team kicks butt.
The most powerful telescope ever sent into space was launched from a European spaceport on Christmas Day. It has a mirror that is six times the size of the Hubble Space Telescope. It had to be folded up like an object in order to fit into the Ariane 5 rocket that carried it away from Earth.
Since then, the telescope has been unfolding in zero gravity. Setting up the sun shield was considered to be the most complex part of the process.
The sun shield is important for the telescope. It helps keep the telescope cold enough to pick up the light from the earliest galaxies, which are too faint for Hubble to see.
It could doom a telescope that had been in the works for decades, and which had already faced years of criticism for rising costs and delays.
The relief was felt just before noon when the call came that all five layers had been pulled taut.
"We are going to be bonds forever because of what we experienced," he said as he thanked the team.
The deployment of the telescope's primary and secondary mirrors is one of several steps that remain. Mission officials said that the process should take about 10 days.
The telescope will be sitting in a solar circle around the sun for a million miles from Earth, where it will be stable because of the tug of the Earth and the Sun. Once it's up and running, it will look for signs of life in the atmospheres of distant planets that could be friendly to life.
