James Webb Space Telescope Unfurls Massive Sunshield in Major Deployment Milestone

upstart writes:

James Webb Space Telescope unfurls massive sunshield in major deployment milestone:

One of the James Webb Space Telescope's most nail-biting deployment steps is safely in the books.

The $10 billion observatory unfurled its huge sunshield on Friday (Dec. 31), carefully unfolding the five-layer structure by sequentially deploying two booms.

[...] The sunshield is one of the most crucial and complicated features of Webb, which launched on Dec. 25 to seek out faint heat signals from the early universe. Detecting such signals requires that Webb keep its instruments and optics extremely cold, and the sunshield will help it do just that by reflecting and radiating away solar energy.

The shiny silver shield measures 69.5 feet long by 46.5 feet wide (21.2 by 14.2 meters) when fully deployed - far too large to fit inside the protective payload fairing of any currently operational rocket. So it was designed to launch in a highly compact configuration and then unfold once Webb got to space.

That deployment is an elaborate, multistep process with many different potential failure points that could sink the entire mission.

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