When it comes to superstitions, NASA and baseball see the world in different ways. It’s one of baseball’s unwritten rules that when a pitcher is throwing a no-hitter through, say, seven innings, you never, ever mention it out loud. To speak of it is to jinx it, and likelier than not, you’ll get clobbered in the eighth.
NASA, clearly, takes a different approach. In the 13 days since the Christmas morning launch of the James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful and complex cosmic observatory ever built—the space agency has been tossing successful inning after successful inning, getting the telescope unfolded, aligned, and powered-up, and keeping it on course to its destination 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) away from Earth at a gravitationally stable spot called L2, where it will station-keep for the next decade, peering deeper into the universe than any telescope ever has before. The space agency has been none too shy about talking up its successes, even hosting a sort of Webb dashboard, with regular updates on just where in space the telescope is and what milestones it has passed.
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Such early, if cautious, enthusiasm is understandable, since the challenges Webb faced before launch were daunting. The $10 billion telescope—which consists principally of an 18-segment, 6.5 m (21.3 ft) mirror and a sun shield the size of a tennis court—had to be folded up small enough to fit in the 5 m (16 ft) payload bay of the Ariane 5 rocket that launched it, then released into space and unfolded in a process that one Webb team leader described as “origami in reverse.” That was never going to be easy. Hundreds of hinges, pulleys, actuators, and more have to work in a perfect synchrony, overcoming 344 so-called “single-point failures”—each a solitary breakdown that, all by itself, could spell the end of the mission.
Far and away, the most challenging step was unfolding the sun shield, a delicate structure that consists of five layers of kapton, a…
Source : time
