Skip to main content

James Webb telescope packs away its massive sunshield to ready for launch

Both sides of the James Webb Space Telescope's sunshield were lifted vertically in preparation for the folding of the sunshield layers.
Both sides of the James Webb Space Telescope’s sunshield were lifted vertically in preparation for the folding of the sunshield layers. NASA/Chris Gunn

The massive sunshield of NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope has been folded away for the last time before its launch. The sunshield is the size of a tennis court and is one of the telescope’s more complex structures, along with the origami-style folding mirror.

The sunshield will protect the delicate components of the telescope from the sun’s rays, allowing it to pick up more faint infrared signals. Folding the sunshield is an involved process, as it requires packing the 70-foot by 47-foot sunshield into a small space in the 18-foot rocket.

“There is nothing really analogous to what we are trying to achieve with the folding up of a tennis court-sized sunshield, but it is similar to packing a parachute,” said Jeff Cheezum, a lead sunshield design engineer at Northrop Grumman, in a statement. “Just like a skydiver needs their parachute packed correctly in order to open perfectly and to successfully get back to Earth, Webb needs its sunshield to be perfectly stowed to ensure that it also opens up perfectly and maintains its shape, in order to successfully keep the telescope at its required operating temperature.”

The packing process takes a full month, as it needs to be laid flat but the shield has many curved surfaces. The layers are stacked in an accordion-like style and then secured in place.

“Think of it backwards; we want the deployed sunshield to achieve a specific shape so we get the performance we need. The whole folding process was designed with that in mind. We have to fold cleanly and carefully the same way each time, to ensure the unfolding occurs exactly the way we want it,” said James Cooper, lead sunshield engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

To make sure everything is in the right place, the engineers use holes in the sunshield layers which line up exactly and are held in place by 107 pins. These hold everything in place during launch and will be released once the telescope is in space and is ready to unfurl its sunshield for real.

“It’s a very methodical process that we use to make sure everything is aligned correctly,” said Marc Roth, mechanical engineering lead at Northrop Grumman. “Our team has been through multiple training cycles, and we’ve implemented many lessons learned from the previous times we’ve done this process, all culminating in this last sunshield fold.”

The telescope is set to launch later this year.

Editors' Recommendations

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
James Webb captures the rarely-seen rings around Uranus
This zoomed-in image of Uranus, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on 6 February 2023, reveals stunning views of the planet’s rings. The planet displays a blue hue in this representative-colour image, made by combining data from two filters (F140M, F300M) at 1.4 and 3.0 microns, shown here as blue and orange, respectively.

The James Webb Space Telescope spends much of its time peering out into distant regions of space searching for some of the earliest galaxies to exist, but it also occasionally turns its sights onto targets a little closer to home. Following up on its image of Neptune released last year, astronomers using Webb have just released a brand-new image of Uranus as you've never seen it before.

As Webb looks in the infrared wavelength, unlike telescopes like Hubble which look in the visible light spectrum, its image of Uranus picks out some features of the planet which are hard to see otherwise like its dusty rings. Uranus' rings are almost invisible in the optical wavelength, but in this new image, they stand out proudly.

Read more
James Webb spots exoplanet with gritty clouds of sand floating in its atmosphere
This illustration conceptualises the swirling clouds identified by the James Webb Space Telescope in the atmosphere of the exoplanet VHS 1256 b. The planet is about 40 light-years away and orbits two stars that are locked in their own tight rotation. Its clouds, which are filled with silicate dust, are constantly rising, mixing, and moving during its 22-hour day.

One of the most exciting things about the James Webb Space Telescope is that not only can it detect exoplanets, but it can even peer into their atmospheres to see what they are composed of. Understanding exoplanet atmospheres will help us to find potentially habitable worlds, but it will also turn up some fascinating oddities -- like a recent finding of an exoplanet with an atmosphere full of gritty, sand clouds.

Exoplanet VHS 1256 b, around 40 light-years away, has a complex and dynamic atmosphere that shows considerable changes over a 22-hour day. Not only does the atmosphere show evidence of commonly observed chemicals like water, methane, and carbon monoxide, but it also appears to be dotted with clouds made up of silicate grains.

Read more
Astronomers share early images from James Webb’s galaxy survey
Images of four example galaxies selected from the first epoch of COSMOS-Web NIRCam observations, highlighting the range of structures that can be seen. In the upper left is a barred spiral galaxy; in the upper right is an example of a gravitational lens, where the mass of the central galaxy is causing the light from a distant galaxy to be stretched into arcs; on the lower left is nearby galaxy displaying shells of material, suggesting it merged with another galaxy in its past; on the lower right is a barred spiral galaxy with several clumps of active star formation.

One of the major aims of the James Webb Space Telescope is to observe some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, and to do that it needs to be able to see extremely distant objects. But looking at a particular very old galaxy in detail is only half of the problem. To truly understand the earliest stages of the universe, astronomers also need to see how these very old galaxies are distributed so they can understand the large-scale structure of the universe.

That's the aim of the COSMOS-Web program, which is using James Webb to survey a wide area of the sky and look for these rare, ancient galaxies. It aims to study up to 1 million galaxies during over 255 hours of observing time, using both Webb's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and its mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) camera. While there is still plenty of observing left to do, the researchers in the COSMOS-Web program recently shared some of their first results.

Read more