The James web space telescope will (finally !) make it’s way to space. It came out of its deep freeze and will now make its way to Houston to unite with its sun shield and spacecraft ride. The heart of the telescope was in chamber A of Johnson’s enormous cryo-vacuum chamber.
Two months ago after a series of tests to confirm its enormous primary mirror — consisting of 18 hexagonal segments — and its science instruments could work to focus and track starlight in the airless cold of space. When it launches, Webb will be the largest space telescope in the world. With seven times the collecting area of the Hubble Space Telescope and ultracool operating temperatures, it will be able to detect infrared light from the earliest stars and galaxies and even analyze the atmospheres of distant planets passing in front of their stars.
Chamber A had to be adapted after the Apollo programme for the Webb. It was stored at 20 Kelvin over the course of 2 months. It then had to be brought to room temperature that took another month.
“We’re extremely elated to be here, especially after the successful completion of our cryo-vacuum and optical testing of the world’s most magnificent time machine, the Webb telescope,” Mark Voyton, the manager for the Optical Telescope Element and Integrated Science Instrument Module, said during the news conference.
During that time, Hurricane Harvey hit — but “the telescope did not know, the chamber did not know that there was an event going on outside its environment,” Jonathan Homan, project manager for Webb’s Chamber A test team at Johnson, said during the news conference.
Although the storm was much fiercer than expected, he said, the Johnson and Goddard teams had planned well enough that they were able to keep personnel and hardware safe and avoid any interruption to testing. And afterwards, he and others added, many of the Webb team volunteered in the community to help Houston recover.