I don't think there's too much interest in space science news on here, but still, I saw this update today about the Webb telescope and know that it's a pretty amazing project: The $10B (with a capital B) telescope just reached its final orbit around the sun this afternoon after a 30-day ride and deployment process.
The telescope is so big - unfurled, it's about the size of a tennis court - it had to fold up origami-style into the launch rocket and then undergo a sequence of many events to fully deploy. That sequence included over three hundred single points of failure, any of which could have ruined the whole 20-plus-year project or at least kept it from working as designed. That many opportunities for failure just blows my mind and was the reason for a testing program that is probably unequalled by any other unmanned mission. The whole deployment process is illustrated really well here (if my link works): Deployment Explorer Webb/NASA
Eventually, when the telescope is fully aligned and calibrated by this summer, it will be looking back to within 100 million years from the big bang and will be able to do measurements on the atmospheres of planets around other stars. The mirror is actually 18 individual mirrors that have to align and control independently (at -340 F) to function as a single unit. It's larger than the Hubble telescope, but Webb doesn't really replace Hubble - it sees infrared and Hubble sees mostly visible light.
Anyway, not typical Water Cooler stuff, but maybe someone from NC State, given our engineering backbone, has worked on it at some point. It would be cool to hear about it if they had.
The telescope is so big - unfurled, it's about the size of a tennis court - it had to fold up origami-style into the launch rocket and then undergo a sequence of many events to fully deploy. That sequence included over three hundred single points of failure, any of which could have ruined the whole 20-plus-year project or at least kept it from working as designed. That many opportunities for failure just blows my mind and was the reason for a testing program that is probably unequalled by any other unmanned mission. The whole deployment process is illustrated really well here (if my link works): Deployment Explorer Webb/NASA
Eventually, when the telescope is fully aligned and calibrated by this summer, it will be looking back to within 100 million years from the big bang and will be able to do measurements on the atmospheres of planets around other stars. The mirror is actually 18 individual mirrors that have to align and control independently (at -340 F) to function as a single unit. It's larger than the Hubble telescope, but Webb doesn't really replace Hubble - it sees infrared and Hubble sees mostly visible light.
Anyway, not typical Water Cooler stuff, but maybe someone from NC State, given our engineering backbone, has worked on it at some point. It would be cool to hear about it if they had.
