Cleanroom Snapshot: NASA Telescope Says “Open Wide”
NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s “Chamber A” in Houston is an enormous thermal vacuum testing chamber and now appears to be opening its “mouth” to take in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for testing. The telescope and the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) are two of the three major elements that comprise the Webb telescope Observatory…
“Webb-Cam” Shows Engineers Working in NASA Cleanroom
NASA’s special “Webb-cam” kept an eye on the development of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., since 2012. Now that Webb telescope has moved to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, a special Webb camera was installed there to continue providing daily video feeds on the…
NASA Telescope Aces Acoustic and Vibration Tests
At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the James Webb Space Telescope team completed the acoustic and vibration portions of environmental testing on the telescope. These tests are merely two of the many that spacecraft and instruments endure to ensure they are fit for spaceflight. For the acoustic test, the telescope was wrapped…
NASA Telescope Staff Perform Eerie “Lights Out”’ Inspection
What happens when the lights are turned out in the enormous cleanroom that currently houses NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope? The technicians who are inspecting the telescope and its expansive golden mirrors look like ghostly wraiths in this image as they conduct a “lights out inspection” in the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility (SSDIF)…
NASA Telescope Gets a Shakedown
Scientists and engineers had many challenges in designing the components of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and then had to custom design and build ways to test it. Because of the sheer size and scale of the assembled Webb telescope, some of the equipment typically used to test spacecraft simply doesn’t measure up. One of…