The sunshield, about the size of a tennis court at full size was folded to fit inside the payload area of an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket’s nose cone prior to launch. The deployment of the five-membrane sun shield is a triumph for the engineering teams at the US space agency (NASA) and the American aerospace manufacturer Northrop Grumman. The fifth and final membrane, which like the other four has the thickness of a human hair because it is made from a specialized polymer called Kapton was locked into place at 16:58 GMT.
“Unfolding Webb’s sun shield in space is an incredible milestone, crucial to the success of the mission,” said Greg Robinson, Webb’s program director at NASA Headquarters. It’s worth noting that all the previous testing was done on Earth, under gravity conditions. This was the first time the shield had been unfurled in a “Zero-G” environment of space. “The first time, and we nailed it,” enthused Alphonso Stewart, NASA’s Webb deployment systems lead.
The telescope is regarded as the successor to the Hubble space observatory which is now 31 years old and nearing the end of its operational life. Webb will do similar science to Hubble but with the next-generation technologies that allow it to see deeper into the cosmos and, therefore, further back in time.
