Okay, so if you’ve been watching this show, you know I’m not big on trusting technology to work, and when that technology is part of the JWST, seeing is believing, and until I see something functions, it is dead to me.

But with even NPR including JWST in more news segments than not, it’s time for an update on JWST.

This decade-delayed and billions over budget spacecraft finally took off on Christmas day and 0-dark-20 in the morning for those of us here in the Americas. For the East coast, that was 7:20 am, with the mission reaching a safe trajectory before anyone in my house was even awake. 

In the subsequent hours and days, things have gone along pretty much as well as could be expected. The timeline has slipped a bit here and there, but that was actually built into the final schedule and has been due to known gaps in knowledge. Specifically, the JWST is a really really big spacecraft, and there isn’t a vacuum chamber large enough for the full spacecraft to be tested under a vacuum. This resulted in unknowns regarding how long it would take various systems to reach desired temperatures and to fully outgas. Beyond dealing with these unknowns, which were all easily handled, in one case just by changing how the Sun hit the spacecraft, everything has so far been managed.

At this point, the majority of the more than 300 single points of failure have been moved past. The multi-layer sunshield has been extended and put under tension so that the layers sit nice and parallel to each other; the secondary mirror has been extended so light captured by the telescope can be sent back to instruments. Major remaining milestones include unfolding the rest of the multi-segmented mirror.

In theory, NASA could catch some photons with the mission in its current configuration, and various folks are out there voicing their hopes at some early images being released. That is not actually in the plan, but NASA, for many very good and valid reasons, is eager to show that astronomy’s newest observatory will live up to the dreams we have for it and will be worth the fight so many fought to get it completed and launched.

According to a timeline put together by Jonathan McDowell from various NASA documents, the next major actions will be the deployment of the port and then starboard mirror segments, with each action being allocated an entire day of effort. The mirrors should lock into position about the same time that JWST starts to use its altitude control system, and a few days later, the mirror actuators will be deployed. This, honestly, is the system that scares me the most because I’ve used telescopes where actuators didn’t do the needed job. Without these actuators, the telescope won’t be able to properly focus the mirror and maintain that focus. 

Hopefully, two weeks from now, we’ll know if they check out and if the mirror successfully deploys. This is a slow process, but we will bring you updates as milestones are crossed. We have 170 days to go before science begins. Buckle up. This is going to be a long and stressful ride.

And if you have a big enough telescope, which I do not, you might even be able to see JWST, but if you can’t there is some pretty awesome other stuff to look at.

More Information

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mission: Live updates (Space.com)