'Wings' deployment for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope successful

Image courtesy: NASA

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: Recently inside the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, engineers successfully completed two deployments for the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) "wings" or side portions of the backplane structure that fold up.

The James Webb Space Telescope is NASA's next orbiting observatory and the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. A tennis court-sized telescope orbiting far beyond Earth's moon, Webb will detect infrared radiation and be capable of seeing in that wavelength.

The wings and telescope structure are essential because they make up the telescope's carbon fiber framework which will hold all 18 of the telescope's mirrors and the tower for the primary mirror.

According to NASA, The James Webb Space telescope, once fully assembled, will be bigger than any rocket that can launch the telescope into space. So the engineering team designed the telescope to fold like origami to fit inside its Ariane 5 rocket. Once launched, Webb will be shipped out to its destination one million miles out in space.

NASA also said that Webb telescope's images will reveal the first galaxies forming approximately 13.5 billion years ago. The telescope will also see through interstellar dust clouds to capture stars and planets forming in our own galaxy. At the telescope's final destination in space, one million miles away from Earth, it will operate at incredibly cold temperatures of -387 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 Kelvin. This is 260 degrees Fahrenheit colder than any place on the Earth’s surface has ever been.