Webb Space Telescope Pauses Deployment To Allow Team To Rest and Prepare for Sunshield Tensioning

James Webb Space Telescope Rotating

James Webb Space telescope. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Work on the deployment of Webb’s sunshield mid-booms went late into the night yesterday. Webb mission management decided this morning to pause deployment activities for today and allow the team to rest and prepare to begin Webb’s sunshield tensioning tomorrow, Sunday, January 2. That deployment is still expected to take place over at least two days.

This will likely affect the full timeline for Webb’s deployment. The timeline will be updated as major deployments resume.

5 Comments on "Webb Space Telescope Pauses Deployment To Allow Team To Rest and Prepare for Sunshield Tensioning"

  1. Untangle the Webb | January 1, 2022 at 2:59 pm | Reply

    Webb’s Epic sunshield tensioning failure is to be called a “pause”?

  2. A lot of those engineers have got to be pretty old by now. They should bring in some muscle to help pull the sunshield.

  3. Think population growth and disease will dume human life on earth long before the expansion of the sun and the change in the habitat zone does us in…

  4. The Earth is large enough to support the whole population here at present. Especially if that thing falls on some highly populated area. Better if it is out there though, cos we need that stuff close by in space more than we do here, where the breeding pits are. People have known what electricity and batteries are for a very long time, and we want as much of that stuff going away from us so it is there if we need it. Any civilization that is more advanced than us out there already knows we are here, and that we are on our way. We can figure out how to deal with the consequences later.

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