James Webb Space Telescope: Waiting for the Light

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Employees moved a mirror piece. The components were delivered to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in custom-built transport containers by their manufacturer, Ball Aerospace in the US state of Colorado. Each mirror is 1.32 meters wide. Overall, it results in a light-gathering surface six times the size of the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror.

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Before the appropriate instruments were built and tested, an alternate version of JWST optics called the Optical Telescope Element Simulator was exposed to space-like conditions in a Space Environment Simulator at Goddard Space Flight Center. Gold thermal blankets encapsulate a system that provides support and heat control. This also includes panels with liquid nitrogen, which can maintain the simulator’s temperature at about minus 170 degrees Celsius. This is supposed to simulate the extreme temperatures the telescope would experience outside Earth.

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100 days of cryogenic testing should ensure that JWST can withstand the conditions in the vacuum of space. The experiment was conducted in Room A, a huge heat and vacuum testing room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The test chamber is the largest of its kind in the world and is protected by a door that weighs 40 tons and is 12.2 meters wide. In the 1960s, the chamber was used to test equipment for the Apollo missions to the Moon.

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A technician carefully handled the gold foil that wrapped the tools during cooling tests in Space Environment Simulator. These intense and frequent tests are designed to ensure that the James Webb Space Telescope will operate when it reaches its destination in space. Because once it starts, scientists have nothing to offer but software patches in case something goes wrong. It is certainly a complex observatory. And it’s a telescope that we can’t maintain like the Hubble Space Telescope,” says Nicole Colon. “But we’ve built a lot of redundancy into the mechanical systems for JWST, and everyone involved has taken a great interest in testing and examining even the smallest aspects.”

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