The Webb Telescope

@Liljo
Well for sure it AINT atmospheric friction🙂

@sonhouse said
@Liljo
Well for sure it AINT atmospheric friction🙂

The Starboard Primary Mirror is now opening. The Webb is approaching 664,000 miles out with about 235,500 miles to go. It has slowed to 896mph.

Every phase has worked well so far. If they pull this off successfully, it will be one of the greatest engineering feats of my lifetime.

@Liljo
For me it was Apollo, but I am biased, I worked on the dam thing🙂

@sonhouse said
@Liljo
For me it was Apollo, but I am biased, I worked on the dam thing🙂

@liljo said
That's another one I consider "one of" the greatest feats of engineering in my lifetime.
That had to be some kind of experience for you. One Christmas, when I was maybe 10 or 11, my folks gave me one of those models we used to get, those kind you glued together. Mine was an Apollo Saturn V. For the day, even the model had all kinds of details, including the hidden Lunar Landing Module.

@jimm619 said
https://news.yahoo.com/space-telescopes-golden-eye-opens-162426674.html

@Liljo
My little niece, who is an expert in space stuff from watching space movies, wants to know how this Webb telescope managed to squeeze through all the asteroids and thick nebula dust clouds which always cripple even the most advanced starships.

@bunnyknight
Well it is a BIT different in real life than movies. One biggie, space is VERY empty and even though there are millions of objects out there in our solar system that could ruin your day if you ran into one at 10,000 km/hr or some such, the thing is there are literally quadrillions of places those million things can be so space is a bit on the empty side otherwise all the probes out there like the two Voyagers now exiting the solar system entirely, they are still sending science data to Earth, even though they are some ten billion miles away, a tribute to our RF guys who figured out how to communicate over many billions of miles.
Anyway space is so empty even craft like those Voyagers are untouched by big stuff and those things have been in space for forty + years.

@bunnyknight said
@Liljo
My little niece, who is an expert in space stuff from watching space movies, wants to know how this Webb telescope managed to squeeze through all the asteroids and thick nebula dust clouds which always cripple even the most advanced starships.

@sonhouse said
@bunnyknight
Well it is a BIT different in real life than movies. One biggie, space is VERY empty and even though there are millions of objects out there in our solar system that could ruin your day if you ran into one at 10,000 km/hr or some such, the thing is there are literally quadrillions of places those million things can be so space is a bit on the empty side otherwi ...[text shortened]... ike those Voyagers are untouched by big stuff and those things have been in space for forty + years.

Has it been announced what the first picture will be (released to the public) ?

@ogb said
Has it been announced what the first picture will be (released to the public) ?

@ogb said
Has it been announced what the first picture will be (released to the public) ?

@Liljo
I wonder if it is being hit by the sun or are the shields in place already to shield the scope from solar heat.
I would imagine that has been done already but it is bit of a scramble to get say the high gain antenna aimed at Earth and at the same time get the shields actually shielding. If they are in place then the final cooldown has already started.
The only thing about that is the scope cooling takes place with radiation only so that is a slow process. I think the scope mirrors have to get down to about 10 degrees K. 10 degrees from absolute zero.
That is the same temperature as my cryopumps use to do their work which is a vacuum pump.