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Constructing the James Webb Space Telescope, a mission led by 

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NASA with its partners the European Space Agency

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and the Canadian Space Agency, requires the collaboration of thousands

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of people from across the United States, Canada and Europe.

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GREG ROBINSON: The James Webb Space Telescope is the most ambitious 

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and complex space science mission humanity has ever undertaken.

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Webb is the highest priority science mission within NASA.

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NAR: This is the optical and science segment of the Webb

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space telescope in one of the largest cleanrooms in the world

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at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.  

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This half of the observatory element successfully

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passed a series of rigorous vibration,

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and acoustic tests, 

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to ensure Webb’s optics and science instruments can handle the stresses of launch. 

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This element was packed and transported to the Johnson Space Center 

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in Houston, Texas, for cryogenic testing inside its massive

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test facility, simply called Chamber A

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a national historic landmark for it’s work during the Apollo missions.

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GREG ROBINSON: Successfully completing the optical telescope element 

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was a significant milestone. Now, we look forward to completing final tests 

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on the spacecraft element. And then, integrating both halves

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into the observatory. NAR: To give you a sense of where we are in the mission, 

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the Webb Space Telescope consists of two main segments

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the spacecraft bus and sunshield, called the Spacecraft Element

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and, the iconic 6.5-meter telescope and science instruments

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called the Optical Telescope Element. 

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Today, both halves of the Webb Space Telescope are

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are at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California.

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Here, the most advanced space telescope optical element 

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will be integrated with the spacecraft element—which includes the tennis court-sized

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5-layer, deployable sunshield and the spacecraft bus

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where the Webb’s data and atitude control systems reside.

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The sunshield protects the telescope’s optics and science instruments from infrared

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radiation, or what we feel as heat, 

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emitted by the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Each thin, sunshield layer 

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is about one-one-thousandth of an inch thick and coated with

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with reflective aluminum and protective silicon to provide Sun protection of SPF 1-million.

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Webb is a testament to innovation. 

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Intricate and advanced technological 

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systems were developed to enable awesome science discoveries.

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ERIC SMITH: The James Webb Space Telescope is the most technologically challenging space science observatory 

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observatory we’ve ever built. No one’s ever done anything like this before

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but the science is worth the wait. 

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AMBER STRAUGHN: Webb will conduct a breath-taking array 

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array of science of investigations across the history of the universe ranging from 

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searching for the first distant galaxies to light up after the big bang, 

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to searching for the building blocks of life in atmospheres of exo-planets. 

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ERIC SMITH: The observatory's capabilities are so enormous, that 

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that major advances are expected across every branch of astronomy. 

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