James Webb Space Telescope Succesfully Deployed!
Great news! The Dacia Sande... wait. THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE IS NOW SUCCESFULLY DEPLOYED IN SPACE!
I've been following this giant origami mirror and it's become a huge fascination for me. Seeing documentaries, reading papers about, watching interviews, I have been excited for so long. I already loved Hubble and this thing is sure to deliver way more than our old pal Hubble ever could.
I was afraid that something could go wrong, very afraid. This is one of the greatest marvels of engineering I've ever seen so it's obvious it could go wrong.
For those who don't know, this telescope was way too big to be fitted into a conventional rocket, like seriously, it's huge (about 22 metres by 12 metres and the mirror alone being 10 metres tall), reason being that for it to work properly it needs appropriate cooling, that being -199C, which isn't very easy when we have a big hot ball of plasma staring everywhere, specially in space where there's no atmosphere, so NASA decided to use a heatshield, this giant heatshield.
Of course it wouldn't fit, no rocket has enough girth to carry that thing, but if they found a way to make it fold and then unfold in space, it could work... And it did!
A lot could have gone wrong, and I knew every single minute possibility in all those 178 release mechanisms for the 50 deployments of parts it had to do. But now I've basically forgotten them all because there are more important things to worry about.
Even if it is in space already, and deployed, it doesn't mean the journey is over, and it's quite a journey.
The telescope is still 1.5 million kms (930 thousand miles) from its Lagrange point (Earth's L2). The point where it'll be gravitationally stable. At that point it'll be able to stay aligned between the sun, the Earth and the moon, which will help with cooling with its giant ass heatshield and of course, will make things more stable, that's when real work shall commence and will begin searching in new horizons.
I'm really damn excited about all this if you couldn't tell, and while there's still more to go, and still more to go wrong, I can't help but be excited.
Good luck out there, James. Don't be like James May, slow, nor like Richard Hammond and crash.
2022 ain't looking that bad.
#NASAWebb is fully deployed! 🎉
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 8, 2022
With the successful deployment & latching of our last mirror wing, that's:
50 major deployments, complete.
178 pins, released.
20+ years of work, realized.
Next to #UnfoldTheUniverse: traveling out to our orbital destination of Lagrange point 2! pic.twitter.com/mDfmlaszzV