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'It's truly Christmas:' James Webb Space Telescope's yuletide launch has NASA overjoyed | Space
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-launch-nasa-reaction
After years of delays, billions of dollars in cost overruns, and several last minute postponements due to technical and weather issues, the James Webb Space Telescope launched into space in a flawless Christmas liftoff that has scientists overjoyed.
"It's truly Christmas with all the presents and everything and we have a space mission," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science missions, said after the launch.
The James Webb Space Telescope launched early Christmas morning on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. Launch team members, some wearing Santa hats and festive face masks amid the ongoing pandemic, cheered as it soared into a cloudy sky. "Go, Webb, go!" one shouted on NASA TV.
The European Ariane 5 rocket with the James Webb Space Telescope aboard lifts off from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. (Image credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace)
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope separates from its Ariane 5 rocket with the bright blue Earth in the background in this view captured after its launch on Dec. 25, 2021.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope separates from its Ariane 5 rocket with the bright blue Earth in the background in this view captured after its launch on Dec. 25, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
5, 2021, in the Jupiter Center at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana.Launch teams monitor the countdown to the launch of Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket carrying NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Saturday, Dec. 25, 2021, in the Jupiter Center at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope deploys its solar array after separating from its Ariane 5 rocket following its launch on Dec. 25, 2021.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope deploys its solar array after separating from its Ariane 5 rocket following its launch on Dec. 25, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)The launch marks only the beginning of the grand telescope's mission, as it still has to flawlessly execute the most challenging sequence of deployments on its way to an orbital sweet spot some 930,000 miles away from Earth.
After days of dicey weather at the European spaceport, "everything fell together on the last day", allowing Ariane 5, one of the world's most reliable launchers, to "deliver the best Christmas present" to astronomers all over the world, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said.
Right on time, the Ariane 5 lifted off at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT, 9:20 a.m. local time in Kourou) as its first-stage Vulcain engine ignited, followed 7 seconds later by two solid-fueled boosters. The Ariane 5, with its most precious and heaviest payload ever, then shot off towards the overcast sky of the French overseas territory at the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Soon, it was only the ramble of the rocket engine deep within the clouds and a thick plume of dust that spectators could witness.
Everything else then followed exactly as planned in what Navias described as "a perfect ride to orbit."
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope separates from its Ariane 5 rocket with the bright blue Earth in the background in this view captured after its launch on Dec. 25, 2021.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope separates from its Ariane 5 rocket with the bright blue Earth in the background in this view captured after its launch on Dec. 25, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)About 27 minutes after liftoff, Arianespace flight controllers confirmed that the James Webb Space Telescope faultlessly separated from Ariane 5's upper stage, prompting a round of applause from the gathered engineers and scientists. At that moment, the James Webb Space Telescope was 864 miles (1,390 kilometers) above Earth, some 500 miles (800 km) higher than the regular orbit of its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
Traveling at 21,000 mph (34,000 kph), Webb was finally on its way, ready to escape the gravitational grasp of Earth and heading to the so-called Lagrangian Point 2, a spot on the sun-Earth axis where the gravitational pull of Earth keeps spacecraft perfectly aligned with the two bodies.
A camera on board of Ariane 5's upper stage captured the final glimpse of the departing Webb, including the moment it unfurled its solar array; the first action in a series of complex deployments that has to be executed for the telescope to work and which has never been performed before. The James Webb Space Telescope was now on its own, receiving power from the sun.
A lot was at stake for the Christmas Day launch (Webb is a $10 billion space telescope designed to study the first stars in the universe) and despite Ariane 5's meticulous track record, relief was palpable on the faces of NASA and the European Space Agency's officials as they commented on the successful mission milestone.
"This is the beginning of one of the most amazing missions that humanity has conceived," Zurbuchensaid in the post-launch press conference. "And I'm so excited to look forward to the next setup of this telescope and all the science to come. This is what we can do when we come together as humans, it's just absolutely incredible."
Words of praise for the ground teams in Kourou as well as the thousands of engineers and scientists who brought the James Webb Space Telescope mission to life came also from NASA chief Bill Nelson.
"This is a great day for planet Earth," Nelson said after launch. "You all have just been incredible. Over three decades, you produced a telescope that is now going to take us back in time like a time machine to the very beginnings of the universe. We are going to discover incredible things that we never imagined."
The James Webb Space Telescope is the most complex astronomy space mission ever conceived. The mission took over 30 years to get from the drawing board to the launch pad, stretching engineers and technologies to their limits.
But the tense phase for Webb is not over yet. Over the next seven days, the telescope will commence what has been described as the most nerve-wrecking part of its deployment sequence, the unfurling of its tennis court-size sun shield.
The procedure hinges on the successful release of 140 mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, 400 pulleys, 90 cables and eight deployment motors, all of which need to perform correctly for the sunshield to fully extend. Without it, the telescope will not work.
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The sun shield will protect the telescope from sunlight and heat, allowing its instruments to cool down to the ultracold temperature of minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 217 degrees Celsius), which is crucial for the mission's detectors to accomplish their task: to detect the faint light coming from the most distant stars and galaxies, those that lit up in the expanding universe in the first millions of years after the Big Bang.
The telescope's primary mirror, consisting of 18 hexagonal segments, will unfold over the next month before the telescope reaches its destination.
Once there, it will take over 100 days for the spacecraft to cool down to its operation temperature, after which the careful alignment of the mirror segments will commence before Webb can take its first images in the summer of 2022.
30 Days of Terror: the Logistics of Launching the James Webb Space Telescope
Back during the 2019 Superconference in Pasadena, I had the chance to go to Northrop Grumman's Redondo Beach campus to get a look at the James Webb Space Telescope. There is the high-bay class 10,000+ cleanroom in building M8, my wife and I along with fellow space nerd Tom Nardi got a chance to look upon what is likely the most expensive single object ever made. The $10 billion dollar space observatory was undergoing what we thought were its final tests before being packaged up and sent on its way to its forever home at the L2 Lagrange point.
Sadly, thanks to technical difficulties and the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be another two years before JWST was actually ready to ship -- not a new story for the project, Mike Szczys toured the same facility back in 2015. But the good news is that it finally has shipped, taking the very, very slow first steps on its journey to space.
Both the terrestrial leg of the trip and the trip through 1.5 million kilometers of space are fraught with peril, of a different kind, of course, but still with plenty of chances for mission-impacting events. Here's a look at what the priceless and long-awaited observatory will face along the way, and how its minders will endure the "30 days of terror" that lie ahead.
Land, Sea, and Air
It may seem self-obvious, but the James Webb Space Telescope is big. Pictures do a poor job of capturing the scale of the thing, and even when they show people working on it, it does little to compare to the experience of standing there looking at the thing. The JWST is large in a way that no other object I've been near has felt. It towers over you, an ungainly thing even in the semi-folded state we saw it in. And looking at the size and complexity of the structure, and especially its apparent fragility, anyone with any engineering curiosity is left wondering how the heck they're going to manage to safely move that thing.
A full scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope
Of course, JWST is designed to be moved, and to fit inside the 5.4-meter fairing of the Ariane rocket that will take it to orbit. But before it gets integrated onto its rocket, the telescope had to be folded into its custom-built shipping container. The Space Telescope Transporter for Air, Road, and Seas (STTARS) is basically a mobile cleanroom designed to hold Webb in the same folded configuration it will be in for its trip to space.
STTARS had been used to transport Webb several times before as it was shuttled around to various NASA facilities for testing and assembly, but on September 24, 2021, Webb began its last journey in STTARS. After being packaged up, the shipping container was loaded onto a special oversized-load tractor-trailer. In the wee hours of the morning, steel-nerved driver George Ardelean piloted the unwieldy load 26 miles (42 km) through the streets and freeways of Los Angeles to Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, where its ride for the next leg of its journey, the cargo vessel MN Colibri, awaited.
On September 26, the MN Colibri pushed off from the dock and made its way south and east, bound for the European Space Agency's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. It was attended by a team of NASA engineers who monitored the health of the spacecraft during its 16-day trip, which included a passage through the Panama Canal. Upon arrival at Kourous, Webb was trucked to the ESA's integration facility, where it was unpacked from STTARS and transferred to another cleanroom for final testing, fueling, and integration with the Ariane 5 launch vehicle.
30 Days of Terror
Assuming all goes well with testing and integration, Webb is scheduled to launch on December 18, 2021, at 7:20 EST. The launch begins a roughly one-month voyage to the observatory's home at Lagrange point L2, during which time any of 300 single-point failure items could scuttle the mission. Like the "Seven Minutes of Terror" that Mars landing missions face, Webb's minders will face 30 days of uncertainty and occasionally nail-biting suspense.
During the eight-minute ride to space, Webb will be subjected to the usual indignities of spaceflight, against which it was thoroughly tested. Starting at about the 30-minute mark, the first milestone -- deployment of the observatory's solar panels -- will occur. It's the first of 50 deployments, and is a critical step since the telescope needs the power from those panels; it has no other source of power onboard. With the solar array deployed and tested, the high-gain antenna will be deployed and tested.
About 12 hours into the mission, Webb will fire its engines to set it on course for L2. Three days later, the sunshield pallets that are stowed along the front and back sides of the main mirror will fold down to their final position. Once that's complete, the mast holding the main mirror will be jacked up to clear the sunshield. Even though the sunshields will still be folded at this point, they still present a significant surface area to the solar wind, so trim tabs at the end of each pallet are deployed to help adjust for the pressure.
Shields Up!
Full deployment of the sunshield is without a doubt the sketchiest part of the whole process. The sunshield consists of five separate metalized Kapton sheets, each the size of three tennis courts. Each one must be unrolled, extended to its full size, tightened, and spaced out vertically for the sunshield to do its job. This takes the coordinated action of 140 release mechanisms, 70 hinges, eight deployment motors, about 400 pullies, and nearly 400 meters of cable to accomplish, not to mention the sensors, wiring harnesses, and computers to control everything. It'll take the better part of two days to complete the sunshield deployment.
Once the sunshield is deployed and tensioned, the optical deployment will begin, about 10 days into the mission. The process begins with the secondary mirror, which rides on a triangular boom that is folded against the center section of the main mirror. This makes way for the main mirror's two side wings, each holding three of the 18 total hexagonal gold-plated beryllium mirrors.
A number of other steps, such as radiator deployments, cryocooler startup, and system checks are also accomplished during deployment, but the spacecraft will be in operational configuration by about day 14 of the mission. This is the best-case scenario, of course -- mission operators have another two weeks or so to get everything just right before Webb arrives on-station and assumes its halo orbit around L2. Controllers will still have a bunch of work to do, including bringing the instruments down to operational temperature, and carefully tuning the main mirror. Each segment of the mirror is fitted with servos that can slightly deform its surface; the servos were clearly visible on the sample mirror section that was on display at the Northrop Grumman plant, and the entire thing was a marvel of engineering. Operators will carefully align each segment of the main mirror, along with the secondary mirror and the fine steering mirror located at the center of the main mirror, to form as perfect an optical system as possible.
Every single one of the steps along the way between Redondo Beach and L2 is critical to the success of the James Webb Space Telescope. The fact that mission planners and engineers have successfully knocked off the first 5,800 miles (9,300 km) of the trip without any major incidents is reassuring, but there's a long way to go yet. Here's hoping that Webb's team handles the next million miles with equal aplomb, and that the much-delayed and much-anticipated instrument begins delivering on its promise for world-class science, and a peek back to the beginning of the universe.
[Featured images: NASA]
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