The telescope consists of five layers, each the size of a tennis court, whose mission is to protect scientific instruments from the intense heat of the sun. They have been neatly stretched before being fully tightened one by one since the two of them.
Because of its huge size, which prevents it from being placed inside a rocket, the telescope folds itself into an origami-like art and must be deployed in space, in an ultra-accurate mission. One of the most difficult stations in this mission was the deployment of the heat shield.
For thirty years, the most powerful telescope ever in the history of space exploration has been waiting for a long time from astronomers from the whole world who are eager to observe the universe with unprecedented capabilities, especially the first galaxies that were formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
The telescope was launched more than a week ago from French Guiana, and is currently more than 900,000 kilometers from Earth. It is still on its way to reaching its final orbit at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, four times the distance between our planet and the Moon.
It is impossible to carry out any repair in case of any technical problem in this dimension.
So the controlled deployment from Baltimore to the US East Coast must be carried out without error.
More than a hundred engineers are currently rotating around the clock to ensure that everything goes according to plan.
On Tuesday, the US space agency (NASA) reported the event in a live broadcast on the Internet. Because there was no device on board that could take pictures of the observatory itself, the only available pictures were taken from the operations control room, where the teams responsible for following up on the deployment of the heat shield applauded for a long time following the announcement of the successful tightening of the fifth layer.
This heat shield measures 20 meters by 14 meters and is designed in the shape of a diamond. Its layers, which were the thickness of a hair from the head, were folded in the shape of an accordion, and are now separated by tens of centimeters.
It is made of kapton material, which was chosen due to its resistance to extreme temperatures. The side closest to the sun can withstand 125 degrees Celsius, and the farthest side is 235 degrees below zero.
This heat shield is vital because James Webb’s science instruments can only operate at very low temperatures and in the dark. The new thing that this telescope has is that it will only work with near and medium infrared rays, which are waves that are not seen with the naked eye.
In order to be able to observe the diminutive lights coming from the far corners of the universe, it must not be affected by the sun’s rays at all, or those reflected by the earth or the moon.
Six months after its launch, the telescope will be ready to reach the beginnings of the universe as well as search for habitable environments outside the solar system.