Webb’s telescope unfolded the sun’s shield. He is only 86 critical steps away from success – ČT24 – Czech Television

This is it: we’ve just wrapped up one of the most challenging steps of our journey to #UnfoldTheUniverse.

With all five layers of sunshield tensioning complete, about 75% of our 344 single-point failures have been retired! pic.twitter.com/P9jJhu7bJX

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 4, 2022

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The telescope will be permanently shielded with a shield towards the Sun, and its giant mirror and detection devices will be on the opposite side. On the “hot” side of the facility, the temperature can rise up to 110 degrees Celsius, but the other side must keep the temperature below minus 223 degrees Celsius for the observatory to function successfully.

The telescope is too large to fit the rocket as a whole, so it traveled folded and should be assembled “on the spot.” Developing the heat shield was considered the most difficult.

Binoculars on the road

The device is still on its way to its orbit, which will be 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and which the device will reach sometime in late January. Hundreds of engineers working 24 hours a day in Baltimore, USA, are involved in its gradual “unpacking.”

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“When someone asks me what wakes me up at night, I answer that it’s the development of a heat shield. We’ll rest when we spread the fifth layer, “said Bill Ochs, the telescope’s project manager, as the shield began to expand. According to AFP, three layers were developed on Friday and the remaining two on Tuesday.

What will be next

The next step will be to place two mirrors, first the smaller one, the secondary one and then the main one. It is covered with gold and has a diameter of 6.6 meters. The mirrors will be adjusted when the device reaches its orbit.

Humans have not yet launched a more powerful telescope into space. Unlike the Hubble Telescope, Webb will not observe the universe from the Earth’s low orbit, but from the so-called second Lagrange point (L2), where the gravitational forces of the Earth and the Sun balance with the centrifugal force of the system. As a result, the telescope can maintain a stable position while being far enough away from the Sun to capture the very faint infrared radiation that arrives at its mirrors from the first stars and galaxies to form 13.5 billion years ago.

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