![]() That’s why we put so many stability and predictability requirements on NIRCam and did so much testing to ensure we understood any errors.”Ĭommissioning the telescope in space will take six months – what NASA calls “an exciting but harrowing time.” The ATC can help with software issues but fixing any major problems with the telescope with help from astronauts – as was the case with Hubble and a special Space Shuttle mission fix – won’t be possible. ![]() “It puts a lot of responsibility on NIRCam to ensure no errors are imprinted on the primary mirror. ![]() Light enters NIRCam, which uses wavefront sensing and control tools to align the mirror. With 18 segments, each with the ability to move in various directions or even change curvature, “there are a lot of ways you can tune the mirror,” Alison says. Those first pictures won’t be Instagram-worthy, but they will be critical to making sure the mirror works once the telescope enters science mode. NIRCam has an important task during that commissioning period, taking initial images that will inform how to position and align the mirror’s hexagonal segments. Then, the telescope and its elements will be cooled, aligned and calibrated. During that period, the telescope’s 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors – together totaling more than 21 feet in diameter – will unfold origami-style and its tennis-court-sized sunshield will unfurl. It uses a thin array of tiny lenses in place of bulky mirrors or larger lenses, potentially cutting size, weight and power needs 10 to 100 times.įollowing launch, Webb will undergo six months of commissioning. The SPIDER (Segmented Planar Imaging Detector for Electro-optical Reconnaissance) prototype is one example. Others would revolutionize vibration isolation and precision pointing for future missions, and more projects would focus on technologies designed to build smaller, lighter-weight space telescopes. More projects are underway on different scales of missions and science, from programs that look at the evolution of massive stars to monitoring the Earth’s carbon cycle. “It’s an example of how we develop a technology with internal research and development that is applied to an initial program and then becomes a standard product of ours.” The same mount design has flown successfully on other missions, including NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), an instrument studying how energy and plasma move near the sun’s surface. “But we developed that technology to get extreme stability for NIRCam.” “When we first came up with this idea, there were a lot of doubters that said, ‘you don't want to bond optics, and you really don't want to do that on a cryogenic mission,’” Alison recalls. For example, the team developed methods to bond cryogenic optics that allow NIRCam to remain stable while functioning in ultracold temperatures: around 40 Kelvin, or about 150☏ colder than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica. NIRCam technology has been applied to other missions.
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