![]() Astronomers around the world, eager to use Webb’s data in their research, braced themselves for some kind of catastrophe to topple the effort. Like the bakers, engineers had presented the world with a picture of what their beautiful space telescope would look like in the end, and now they had to make it happen. Read: This isn’t the big telescope debut NASA imaginedįrom there, the deployment sequence reminded me of The Great British Bake Off, a cosmic version of the Showstopper Challenge. ![]() Now the observatory could power itself and could move on with ever more complex steps on the checklist that has consumed the scientists until today. The observatory released its solar panel, stretching it like an insect arching a wing toward the sun. The first “this has to work” moment came just a half hour after Webb launched. If something had jammed during deployment and couldn’t get unstuck, the next Hubble would have become a new piece of space junk. The mission is a very complicated series of “this has to work” moments. But they wouldn’t be able to help Webb after it launched. Astronauts managed to build the International Space Station in orbit, yes, and to repair the Hubble Space Telescope when it needed fixing. When I asked them about that, their face would turn into a perfect imitation of the grimace emoji. The deployment sequence was another story. The launch wasn’t the scary bit Webb was riding on one of the most reliable rockets in the industry. ![]() When I asked the engineers and scientists there about the launch, they would make a bit of a nervous face before returning to a confident expression. The mood in town in the days before launch was cheery optimism, with an undercurrent of low-grade panic. The Webb telescope, named after a former NASA administrator, left Earth in a thundering launch from a rain-forest-ringed spaceport. Webb, once compact and curled up, has finally become a real space telescope. Rigby was in the mission-operations room at the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, when they called it. The deployment, the scariest part of the mission-the one that astronomers and engineers have dreaded for years-is over. Over the past two weeks, Webb’s stewards have worked nearly nonstop, trading 12-hour shifts, checking and rechecking data as hundreds of little mechanisms clicked into action.Īnd this afternoon, one final piece slid into place. If an important part became stuck-really, truly stuck-NASA would have to face the painful reality of abandoning its brand-new, $10 billion mission. NASA had never attempted such a complicated deployment before, and there were hundreds of ways that the process could go wrong. Read: Why is NASA sending its new telescope a million miles away? Now, in space, it was time for Webb to unfurl. Engineers had carefully crumpled the massive observatory, folding up its pieces of hardware, so that it could fit on top of a rocket. After the telescope made it into space, controllers in the United States took over. Webb, a NASA-led international mission, left Earth from a European spaceport in French Guiana, in South America. Rigby’s son, now 8 years old, watched Webb’s historic launch on a livestream on Christmas morning. “I remember him asking my wife, ‘So where’s your telescope at work?’” “It took him a while to figure out that not everybody has a telescope at work,” Rigby told me. Over the years, they saw the observatory’s 18 mirrors-tiles of a lightweight metal called beryllium, coated in brilliant gold-installed, one by one, then the science instruments bolted into place. They would stand together on an observation deck overlooking a giant, glass-walled room and watch the technicians, dressed head-to-toe in protective garments to prevent contamination, do their work. Rigby, an astrophysicist, used to bring her young son to the NASA center in Maryland to watch the James Webb Space Telescope being assembled. To Jane Rigby’s son, it’s “mama’s telescope.” It is the next Hubble, designed to observe nearly everything from here to the most distant edges of the cosmos, to the very first galaxies. To the world, the new telescope that recently launched to space is one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors in history.
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