Constructing the James Webb Space Telescope, a mission led by
NASA with its partners the European Space Agency
and the Canadian Space Agency, requires the collaboration of thousands
of people from across the United States, Canada and Europe.
GREG ROBINSON: The James Webb Space Telescope is the most ambitious
and complex space science mission humanity has ever undertaken.
Webb is the highest priority science mission within NASA.
NAR: This is the optical and science segment of the Webb
space telescope in one of the largest cleanrooms in the world
at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
This half of the observatory element successfully
passed a series of rigorous vibration,
and acoustic tests,
to ensure Webb’s optics and science instruments can handle the stresses of launch.
This element was packed and transported to the Johnson Space Center
in Houston, Texas, for cryogenic testing inside its massive
test facility, simply called Chamber A
a national historic landmark for it’s work during the Apollo missions.
GREG ROBINSON: Successfully completing the optical telescope element
was a significant milestone. Now, we look forward to completing final tests
on the spacecraft element. And then, integrating both halves
into the observatory. NAR: To give you a sense of where we are in the mission,
the Webb Space Telescope consists of two main segments
the spacecraft bus and sunshield, called the Spacecraft Element
and, the iconic 6.5-meter telescope and science instruments
called the Optical Telescope Element.
Today, both halves of the Webb Space Telescope are
are at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California.
Here, the most advanced space telescope optical element
will be integrated with the spacecraft element—which includes the tennis court-sized
5-layer, deployable sunshield and the spacecraft bus
where the Webb’s data and atitude control systems reside.
The sunshield protects the telescope’s optics and science instruments from infrared
radiation, or what we feel as heat,
emitted by the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Each thin, sunshield layer
is about one-one-thousandth of an inch thick and coated with
with reflective aluminum and protective silicon to provide Sun protection of SPF 1-million.
Webb is a testament to innovation.
Intricate and advanced technological
systems were developed to enable awesome science discoveries.
ERIC SMITH: The James Webb Space Telescope is the most technologically challenging space science observatory
observatory we’ve ever built. No one’s ever done anything like this before
but the science is worth the wait.
AMBER STRAUGHN: Webb will conduct a breath-taking array
array of science of investigations across the history of the universe ranging from
searching for the first distant galaxies to light up after the big bang,
to searching for the building blocks of life in atmospheres of exo-planets.
ERIC SMITH: The observatory's capabilities are so enormous, that
that major advances are expected across every branch of astronomy.