Aerospace

James Webb Space Telescope

James Webb Space Telescope or JWST—Little over 3/4th of the way to L2, it’s final parking spot where engineers will start calibrating its 18 mirrors one by one using a bright distant start… JWST is as big an event as Apollo 11 landing the man on the moon 🌝 and bringing them back safely. 25 years in the making, people have spent their entire or major part of their professional careers on JWST, named after NASA’s pioneering director James Webb who ran the agency in the 60s and was more closely associated with the Apollo program but also believed in science and space exploration. Yesterday the team finished deploying the starboard side panel of three mirrors after port side mirrors a day earlier going step-by-step checklist and executing the commands. A crucial and nail biter was deploying five layers of tennis-court size ‘SPF 1 million’ sunshield by releasing 139 latches, using 400 pulleys and about one-quarter miles long cables all without any cameras to observe if it is working. Engineer relied solely on telemetry to ‘observe’ if commands were executed as expected or not. Also, they created a simulation that is fed the telemetry data for near real-time (~3-sec delay) visual feedback.

Lagrange 2 or L2 is the point around stars like our Sun where gestational pulls from various bodies are in equilibrium therefore object’s don’t need a lot of energy to stay in that spot. There are 5 spots like L2. L2 was picked so JWST stays behind Earth or rather in its shadow to protect it from Sun’s heat and infrared rays. JWST works on infrared radiation and not in vision light like the Hubble telescope. As we can see the difference in the size of the collecting mirrors between the Hubble and JWST. Scientists are hoping to see as far back as the formation of the first stars and galaxies after the Big Bang.

JWST is a symbol of systems engineering at its best. Accidents can happen that may cause problems for the JWST mission but I am hoping that it will perform as expected and my fingers are crossed. A huge thumbs up 👍 to the entire #NASA team. 👏❤️

Burt Rutan - The Magician of Mojave

Long before Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos were even acted in any way shape or form about private space tourism there was (still is!) a guy in Mojave California who has been designing and flying the aircraft that he designed since the 1970s. It is one of the reasons why most aviation enthusiasts, experimental aircraft builders, and general aviation private pilots, including myself, were not too excited, at least for Branson and Bezos, and thought of these two billionaires going to space only to show off their wealth as they did not contribute to the space exploration personally other than investing their money—Branson did it for his affection for flying but Bezos did it for—me too! Musk and his company SpaceX is a completely different category of reusable space vehicles altogether, and in addition, he is respected as an accomplished engineer in his own right so avoided that criticism.