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At the end of this video you can see the array deploying successfully.

Cool, lets hope the mirror and umbrella deploy OK and that NASA have tested it a bit better than the Hubble scope

Desp

First photo received from the James Webb space telescope.....

I wish I knew in advance that it's standard procedure for Ariane to not launch until T+6 - that 6 second "wait" was agonising!
Such a huge engineering achievement - and some ridiculously complex bits of deployment still to come - not least the sunshield.

Worth a watch - unfolding the sunshield involves 300 single point of failure deployments - wowzers
Oh and the whole thing runs off 2kW of solar power - double wowzers!

Whats the irradiance of the sun in space?

Tinbum wrote: ↑Tue Dec 28, 2021 7:22 pm Whats the irradiance of the sun in space?

At the top of the atmosphere about 1300W/m2, if you work out how many m2 there are in a sphere of 150,000,000,000 m radius you can see the suns energy output is................quite a lot

Desp

PS, lets hope Muskies starlink satellites don't bash a hole in it.

I think it's way past the orbits of the Starlink satellites already - they're only orbiting at what, 500km - James Webb is off out to a 1.5million km solar orbit at the Lagrange 2 point! No chance of any repair missions as with Hubble.

Oh that's good, I didn't know if it was parked in a low orbit for a bit while they checked it out, as you say though if they forgot to tighten that widget it's doomed

Desp

Check out this NASA website - Where is Webb?

Gives live positioning and deployment updates of the telescope as it makes its way to the L2 point and other cool stats - shows the temperature differential across the satellite for example!

https://webb.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunc ... sWebb.html