James Webb’s sunshield extended to its full 47-foot width

By Georgina Torbet Published April 28, 2022

Following a successful launch on Christmas day, the James Webb Space Telescope is currently heading through space, having traveled almost 500,000 miles from Earth. It is just over halfway to its eventual destination: The L2 orbit, called a Lagrange point, where it will move around the sun in a complex path. As James Webb travels it is slowly unfolding its various hardware which had to be folded up origami-style to fit into the Ariane 5 rocket which launched it.

The telescope is currently in the process of deploying its tennis court-sized sunshield — a complex operation of many steps which began earlier this week and is expected to take four to five days. This started with the deployment of structures called Pallet Structures, which hold the sunshield itself plus components like cables and pulleys. With the forward and aft pallet structures in place, the next step was deploying the Deployable Tower Assembly, a structure that creates space between the spacecraft and the telescope to make space for the sunshield. This deployment took place on Wednesday, December 29.

Recommended Videos

With that done, over Thursday and Friday this week the team deployment the aft moment flap to help maintain the telescope’s orientation once it is in orbit, and released the sunshield covers which protected the thin sunshield during launch.

The latest update from NASA is that James Webb has extended its two sunshield mid-booms. These “arms” extend to the left and right of the telescope, pulling the thin membrane of the sunshield with them until it spanned the full 47 feet of its width. Their deployment means that all of the 107 release devices for the various parts of the sunshield deployment have now been released.

“The mid-booms are the sunshield’s workhorse and do the heavy lifting to unfold and pull the membranes into that now-iconic shape,” said Keith Parrish, Webb observatory manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a blog post.

The deployment of the mid-booms took a little longer than expected as the team paused to assess a possible issue with the rolling up of the sunshield cover. The switches on the cover seemed not to have activated, but other sensors showed that the cover had indeed rolled up correctly. They decided to go ahead and the deployment was successful.

“Today is an example of why we continue to say that we don’t think our deployment schedule might change, but that we expect it to change,” Parrish said. “The team did what we had rehearsed for this kind of situation — stop, assess, and move forward methodically with a plan. We still have a long way to go with this whole deployment process.”

The next step is for the sunshield to be tensioned, in which each of its five layers will be stretched into place, which is expected to happen over the next few days.

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Topics

Space

James Webb captures gorgeous image of a Cosmic Tornado

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope observed Herbig-Haro 49/50, an outflow from a nearby still-forming star, in high-resolution near- and mid-infrared light with the NIRCam and MIRI instruments. The intricate features of the outflow, represented in reddish-orange color, provide detailed clues about how young stars form and how their jet activity affects the environment around them. A chance alignment in this direction of the sky provides a beautiful juxtaposition of this nearby Herbig-Haro object (located within our Milky Way) with a more distant, face-on spiral galaxy in the background.

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured another stunning image of space, this time showing the dramatic scenes around a baby star. Very young stars can throw off powerful jets of hot gas as they form, and when these jets collide with nearby dust and gas they form striking structures called Herbig-Haro objects.

This new image shows Herbig-Haro 49/50, located nearby to Earth at just 630 light-years away in the constellation Chamaeleon. Scientists have observed this object before, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, and they named the object the "Cosmic Tornado" because of its cone-like shape. To show the impressive powers of James Webb to capture objects like this one in exquisite detail, you can compare the Spitzer image from 2006 and the new James Webb image.

Space

NASA’s Webb telescope peers straight at Saturn-like planets 130 light-years away

Saturn captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope is NASA's most precise and technically proficient equipment for observing the wonders of the universe. Astronomers rely on it to unravel the deepest secrets by peaking at distant solar systems and capturing planets like those in ours.

Much recently, the Webb Telescope was able to capture its first direct image of exoplanets nearly 130 light-years away from the Earth. The observatory seized images of four "giant" planets in the solar system of a distant star called HR 8799. This is a fairly young system formed roughly 30 million years ago, a timeline that dwarfs in comparison to our solar system's 4.6 billion years of age.

Space

James Webb captures a stunning view of the dreamy Flame Nebula

Webb's image of the Flame Nebula

Our universe is host to many beautiful and fascinating objects, and we're lucky enough to be able to view many of them using high tech instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope. A new Webb image shows a new view of the gorgeous Flame Nebula, an emission nebula located in the constellation of Orion.

This nebula is a busy stellar nursery, with many new stars being formed there. But it isn't stars which researchers were interested in when they looked to the nebula -- in this case, they were studying objects called brown dwarfs. Bigger than most planets but smaller than a star, brown dwarfs are too small to sustain fusion in their cores, so they are often referred to as failed stars.