To celebrate the New Year, consider taking a day off.
This is what the team manages for the complex posting process. James Webb Space Telescope They do, take Saturday (January 1) off. Work will resume on Sunday (January 2), according to A Agency Update.
The stop comes after a long day on Friday (December 31) spent by the team spread two mid-boom which supports the display of the kite-shaped solar shield for the observatory.
live updates: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Mission
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“Work continued on implementing sunscreens on the web late into the night,” agency officials wrote in the update. “Webb’s Mission Management decided this morning to pause deployment activities and allow the team to rest and prepare to launch Webb’s sunvisor.”
Today also marks a full week since the long-awaited launch of the observatory on Christmas morning.
But the launch was not the most stressful time for JWST. During its first week in space, the telescope deployed its solar panels, performed two path-correction burns, and I opened the huge sunshade It will protect sensitive tools from sunlight. A full deployment requires 1 month and 300+ points where a wrong move can destroy the observatory.
The next step in this marathon is to separate the five membranes of the sun shield in a process NASA calls “stress” and is expected to take two days. Originally it was supposed to start today and end tomorrow, and now it will start tomorrow and end on Monday (January 3rd), if all goes well.
The successful tightening of the sun shield will mark the end of the deployment of this key piece of JWST. The agency said it will hold a press conference after the tension ends. The observatory will then move to open its secondary mirror, according to A. NASA timeline Detail of the publishing process.
As of today, at 1:30 pm EDT (1830 GMT), the JWST was located more than 475,000 miles (760,000 km) away, more than half its long journey to its final stop in orbit around what astronomers call Lagrang point 2 or L2.
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