The world's most powerful space telescope has started to unfold its massive five-layered sunshield after the repair of a couple of minor issues.
Controllers of the telescope began tightening the tension in the sunshield, which is the last step in unfolding the sunshield the size of a tennis court designed to keep the $10 billion observatory cool, Space.com reported on Monday.
The tensioning was delayed two days both because of the minor issues that needed to be worked on, and also because the engineers took a break for the New Year's Day holiday on Saturday.
"We're not surprised,", Webb project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Bill Ochs said regarding the delay on Monday.
"We understand that we will find things that we can't see on the ground and when we look at them, we take a very close look at it, to make sure we understand," he added.
Before starting the tensioning of the sunshield, engineers spent a day studying the power subsystem of the telescope. They found two issues that could’ve been left alone, but they decided to err on the side of caution.
One of the issues had to do with a set of six motors to be used during the sunshield tensioning. The motors were directly in the path of sunlight, which caused them to heat up more than expected.
This issue was fixed easily, by reorienting the telescope to move the motors more in the shade.
The other issue had to do with the solar array output that affects the telescope’s power. The solar array’s duty cycle was set in a way that was preventing the telescope from receiving the resources it needed. The engineers changed the duty cycles to fix the issue.
Now that the engineers are back on duty and the issues fixed, the deployment of the sunshield is expected to finish on Wednesday.
The James Webb telescope specializes in heat-sensitive infrared observations, which makes the sunshield a vital component of the observatory. The sunshield is part of a month-long deployment procedure to get the Hubble Space Telescope successor ready for gathering data from a distant point from Earth, nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) away from our planet, Space.com reported.
