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To make use of every square
inch of available space
on board satellites,
engineers have had to design
extremely small, lightweight,
highly reliable parts.
To reduce the need for physical storage space of magnetic tapes, engineers designed microelectronics to process data on orbit as the satellite gathered it.
In order to design and implement
a computer sophisticated enough
to accomplish this,
a large number of parts
had to be housed
in a very small area or volume.
Microelectronics allowed us to get
as many as 2000 electronic components
into a very small silicon
integrated circuit.
The ability to open and close
over 62,000 individual
little doors
is really what is enabling
some of the science
for the James Webb Space Telescope.
Each individual shutter
is 100 by 200 microns,
or about the size of a few hairs.
There are four arrays, each
with 62,000 shutters,
meaning the entire instrument has
just over a quarter of a million shutters.