The James Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed all five layers of its tennis-court-sized sunshield.
The James Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed all five layers of its tennis-court-sized sunshield, a prerequisite for the telescope's science operations and the most nerve-wracking part of its risky deployment.
The successful deployment of the fourth layer was confirmed at 10:23 a.m. EST as the telescope cruised some 546,000 miles from Earth. The final, fifth layer, was tensioned at 12:09 p.m. EST and was met with cheers and applause from control teams. With the ultimate goal to detect the extremely faint light coming from the most distant stars and galaxies, those that lit up the darkin the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, Webb's detectors need to be extremely sensitive. Any heat from the telescope would dazzle those detectors and outshine that faint precious signal.
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