Cape Canaveral, Florida (AP) — NASA on Tuesday performed the most complex, important thing ever on its newly launched space telescope: opening and drawing a sunshade the size of a tennis court.
Ground controllers cheered and fisted once the fifth and final layer of the sunshield was tightly secured. It took only 1 1/2 days to tighten the ultra-thin layers using motor-driven cables, which was half the time expected.
The 7-ton James Webb Space Telescope is so large that the sunshield and primary gold-plated mirror had to be folded for launch. The sunshield is particularly heavy – it spans 70 by 46 feet (21 by 14 m) to keep all infrared, heat-sensing science instruments in constant subzero shadow.
Darpan is slated for release later this week.
The $10 billion telescope is more than halfway toward its destination 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away after its Christmas Day send-off. It is the largest and most powerful observatory ever built – 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope – enabling it to look almost back to the beginning of time.
Considered a successor to Hubble, Webb will attempt to hunt for light from the universe’s first stars and galaxies, which formed 3.7 billion years ago.
“It’s a really big moment,” project manager Bill Ochs told the control team in Baltimore. “We still have a lot of work to do, but getting the sunshield out and deploying is really huge.”
Engineers spent years remodeling and making changes to the shed. At one point, dozens of fasteners fell off during the vibration test. That made Tuesday’s success even sweeter, as nothing like it had ever been done before in space.
“The first time and we nailed it,” engineer Alfonso Stewart told reporters.