The multicultural James Webb Space Telescope team had lots to celebrate this holiday season following two weeks of hard labor to get the complex telescope deployed, from a Christmas Day launch to working through Eastern Orthodox holidays.
Webb's enormous mirror was finally unfurled on Saturday (Jan. 8), bringing the most difficult telescope deployment in space to a close. Project manager Bill Ochs said in a press conference from Webb's mission control center at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, that all issues that surfaced after the observatory's launch on Dec. 25 were small and significantly less than what was simulated.
"Everyone is doing excellent," Ochs said Saturday. "I think everyone is extraordinarily excited at this point. I don't think there was one point during the entire last two weeks — even the period leading up to launch, down to [the] launch site — where anybody felt down ... but besides that, we're on an incredible high right now."
According to NASA, the telescope had to go through 50 main deployment events, comprising 178 release mechanisms, all of which had to work flawlessly in order for the telescope to be successful. Those events went off without a hitch.
After hearing there was a "deployed telescope on orbit," the Goddard control team rejoiced and carefully exchanged high-fives (despite coronavirus precautions owing to the ongoing epidemic) after hearing there was a "deployed telescope on orbit," as filmed by NASA Television during deployment on Saturday.
The telescope is still on its way to its "parking spot" at the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), which is around 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) distant from our planet. In the coming weeks, Webb will need to test its equipment and align its mirrors, among other significant milestones.
The 18 individual hexagon-shaped mirrors that make up Webb's gold-plated primary mirror face, which is 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) wide, will take at least five months to calibrate and position. The observatory will only be ready to take its first photographs of outer space after that.
"It's not downhill from here. It's all kind of a level playing field," Ochs said of the mission's difficulty in future weeks. But the mirror, with all of its single-point failures, was a considerable obstacle for the team to surmount successfully, he noted.
"That was probably the highest risk part of the mission," he said of the mirror deployment. "[But] that doesn't mean all our risk goes away and doesn't mean we lose our intensity as far as maintaining our discipline for the mission."
