NASA's James Webb telescope to enter final and crucial stage of deploying its tennis court-sized sunshield

• NASA has successfully finished tensioning the first three layers of the James Webb’s sunshield.
• The final two layers are left after which the sunshield will be fully deployed.
• The sunshield is highly important as it will protect the instruments inside from the sun’s radiation and other sources of light and heat.

NASA finally launched the James Webb telescope last Christmas after decades of research and development. The historic launch was successful after some delays but that was only the first hurdle given the complexity of the honeycomb-shaped space telescope. Following that was a series of deployments of the telescope’s most important parts.

The James Webb telescope’s movable parts were folded so that the telescope would be small enough to fit inside the 16-foot Ariane 5 rocket. The $10 billion telescope has a total of 50 major deployments and 178 release mechanisms before it can fully take shape. The telescope has now reached its most crucial part of unfolding its massive tennis court-sized sunshield which has five layers.

NASA began tensioning the first layer of the sunshield on Monday, with the second and third layers following subsequently. These three layers are the closest to the sun, and the total tensioning process took the team five and a half hours to complete. Tensioning for the final two layers of the Webb’s sunshield will take place tomorrow.

“The membrane tensioning phase of sunshield deployment is especially challenging because there are complex interactions between the structures, the tensioning mechanisms, the cables and the membranes,” said James Cooper, NASA’s Webb sunshield manager, based at Goddard Space Flight Center.

After the tensioning of the final two layers, the sunshield will be fully deployed. This five-layer sunshield is important because it will protect the telescope from the sun’s radiation. Since the James Webb telescope has infrared light observations, the instruments inside the telescope have to be kept extremely cold. The sunshield will not only protect it from the sun’s radiation but also other sources of light and heat including heat emitted by the observatory itself.

The final destination for the James Webb telescope is the second Lagrange point or L2 which is 1 million miles away from Earth. Unlike the Hubble telescope, the Webb will not orbit the Earth but it will instead orbit the sun. The telescope’s mission is to observe very faint infrared signals of very distant objects and help scientists learn more about the origin of our universe.

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