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July 14, 2014
Sunshield
The James Webb Space Telescope will go from Redondo Beach to French Guiana to be launched in 2018. Last week the sunshield was tested. Here's an animation showing the entire deployment sequence from a couple of seconds after launch until 29 days later when it begins to take up its permanent residence at the L2 point. And there the most powerful telescope ever built by humans will sit...over your head at night, every night. And people worry about drones. Of course, you can tell people that because of the sunshield the telescope won't be able to point at Earth, but will a nutjob listen?
Three days after launch it will be beyond the moon's orbit. The unfurling of the sunshield begins at 2:48 in the video which is about five days into the mission at a distance of 626,000 km from Earth.
Filed under Science | permalink | July 14, 2014 at 02:23 PM
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