In the Dark

I’ve been busy all afternoon supervising an online examination and I’m now about to cook my dinner, which means I haven’t got time to post anything much but I will pass on the very welcome news that the James Webb Space Telescope has now completed the lengthy sequence of operations that were required to deploy a large sunshield, the primary and secondary mirrors and other bits and bobs needed to turn it into a proper observatory rather than just a basket of deployables. The whole thing should now look something like this:

There were over 300 potential single-point failures in this sequence so these last couple of weeks have been as stressful as the launch. Now commissioning work can begin.

This all gives me the excuse to have a celebratory drink just like I did on Christmas Day. Cheers!

This entry was posted on January 8, 2022 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags James Webb Space Telescope. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.