Mars Rover Opportunity Faces New Threat: Budget Ax

The JWST mission was under review for cancellation by the United States Congress in 2011 after about $3 billion had been spent, and more than 75 percent of its hardware was either in production or undergoing testing. In November 2011, Congress reversed plans to cancel the JWST and instead capped additional funding to complete the project at $8 billion.

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Mars Rover Opportunity Faces New Threat: Budget Ax

The JWST mission was under review for cancellation by the United States Congress in 2011 after about $3 billion had been spent, and more than 75 percent of its hardware was either in production or undergoing testing. In November 2011, Congress reversed plans to cancel the JWST and instead capped additional funding to complete the project at $8 billion.

I'm always stunned by how much money can be found for military "investments". It seems a shocking waste of money to cancel this mission so far into it. :(

The Potential for Detecting Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows from Population III Stars with the Next Generation of Infrared Telescopes.

Why JWST is important:- We model the flux density of GRBs from Pop III stars through JWST IR filters, and determine the length of time this flux density remains above JWST's sensitivity limits

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Mock the Bus

At Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems facilities in Redondo Beach, California, integration and test technicians work on a mock-up of the James Webb Space Telescope spacecraft bus, testing the assembly of its parts.

The spacecraft bus will provide the necessary support functions for the operation of the Webb Observatory after it is launched into space in 2018.

The bus is the home for six major subsystems:


•Electrical Power Subsystem
•Attitude Control Subsystem
•Communication Subsystem
•Command and Data Handling Subsystem
•Propulsion Subsystem
•Thermal Control Subsystem

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Webb's Fully Integrated 'Heart' Lowered into the Chamber

Engineer Jack Marshall held his breath. The "heart" of the James Webb Space Telescope hung from a cable 30 feet in the air as it was lowered slowly into the massive thermal vacuum chamber at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

This "heart" of Webb is called the ISIM or Integrated Science Instrument Module, which along with its thermal vacuum test frame and supporting hardware, weighs about as much as an elephant. Within this test frame, ISIM sits inside a big-mirrored cube of cryo-panels and blankets. This process can be seen in a video by a Goddard videographer.

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/webbs-fully-integrated-heart-lowered-into-the-chamber/index.html

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There is a good article in the July, 2014 issue of Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine about the James Webb telescope. It is online here
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/infrared-dawn-next-space-telescope-will-be-hubble-x-100-180951409/

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

There is a good article in the July, 2014 issue of Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine about the James Webb telescope. It is online here
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/infrared-dawn-next-space-telescope-will-be-hubble-x-100-180951409/

Thanks for the article!

James Webb Space Telescope, will be up and running 2018.
Will be able to look way back in time.

Hubble, will continue to gaze the stars.

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Webb Telescope Microshutters Journey into NASA Clean Room

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope microshutters have taken a short jaunt in preparation of its million mile journey in four years. The microshutters were moved into a NASA Goddard cleanroom for testing to verify they work correctly before being installed in the Webb's Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument.

Click the link to watch the video

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Building such things is amazing, and I'm sure it's very rewarding for every member of the team. Even if one job may be very dull and tedious, at least it is known what piece in the puzzle it is. I think about projects like the atom bomb when many of the workers didn't know the purpose of their minutiae. I'm looking forward to the launch. Hopefully they have redundancies for the redundancies in case of a malfunction since it won't be able to be visited for a fix.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

Building such things is amazing, and I'm sure it's very rewarding for every member of the team. Even if one job may be very dull and tedious, at least it is known what piece in the puzzle it is. I think about projects like the atom bomb when many of the workers didn't know the purpose of their minutiae. I'm looking forward to the launch. Hopefully they have redundancies for the redundancies in case of a malfunction since it won't be able to be visited for a fix.

+1

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Testing Completed on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Backplane

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has reached another development milestone with the completion of static load testing of its primary mirror backplane support structure (PMBSS) moving the telescope one step closer to its 2018 launch. "This is the largest, most complex cryogenically stable structure humans have ever built," said Scott Texter, Optical Telescope Element manager for Northrop Grumman. "Completion of the static testing verifies it can hold the weight it is designed to hold. Now the structural backbone of the observatory is officially verified and ready for integration."

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Leading Space Experts to Discuss the Search for Life Beyond Earth

Space and ground observatories are cataloging and characterizing hundreds and what is expected to eventually be thousands of potentially habitable worlds in our galaxy. NASA space-based observatories are making unprecedented new discoveries. The agency’s next step, the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb telescope), will continue to help scientists rewrite scientific textbooks after its scheduled launch in 2018.

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Finding Life Beyond Earth is Within Reach

NASA's quest to study planetary systems around other stars started with ground-based observatories, then moved to space-based assets like the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Kepler Space Telescope. Today's telescopes can look at many stars and tell if they have one or more orbiting planets. Even more, they can determine if the planets are the right distance away from the star to have liquid water, the key ingredient to life as we know it. The James Webb Space Telescope will be one of the primary instruments scientists use to continue the search for planets outside our Solar System.

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Discover the "X-Factor" of NASA's Webb Telescope in "Behind the Webb" Video

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray observatory have something in common: a huge test chamber used to simulate the hazards of space and the distant glow of starlight. Viewers can learn about this mysterious chamber and its history in "X-Factor," a new video in the "Behind the Webb" series. The video takes viewers behind the scenes to understand more about the Webb telescope and how it compares with other NASA observatories.

Click link to watch the video

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NASA's Webb Sunshield Stacks Up to Test!

The Sunshield on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is the largest part of the observatory—five layers of thin membrane that must unfurl reliably in space to precise tolerances. Last week, for the first time, engineers stacked and unfurled a full-sized test unit of the Sunshield and it worked perfectly.
The Sunshield is about the length of a tennis court, and will be folded up like an umbrella around the Webb telescope’s mirrors and instruments during launch. Once it reaches its orbit, the Webb telescope will receive a command from Earth to unfold, and separate the Sunshield's five layers into their precisely stacked arrangement with its kite-like shape.

For more information about the Webb telescope, visit: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/webb
For more information on the Webb Sunshield, visit: http://jwst.nasa.gov/sunshield.html

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so far so good then 3 more yrs till launch . Let's hope the optics are ok this time seeing as that's what they stuffed last time with hubble

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so far so good then 3 more yrs till launch . Let's hope the optics are ok this time seeing as that's what they stuffed last time with hubble

Yes, this time a second or third repair mission is not possible. It must work at the first instance.
Tullio

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so far so good then 3 more yrs till launch . Let's hope the optics are ok this time seeing as that's what they stuffed last time with hubble

Yes, this time a second or third repair mission is not possible. It must work at the first instance.
Tullio

!! Very risky! Could become a very expensive abberation... (let's hope it won't!)

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so far so good then 3 more yrs till launch . Let's hope the optics are ok this time seeing as that's what they stuffed last time with hubble

Yes, this time a second or third repair mission is not possible. It must work at the first instance.
Tullio

!! Very risky! Could become a very expensive abberation... (let's hope it won't!)

+ 100!! :)

Thanks for the updates Julie :)

No, they could not reach a Lagrange point where JWST is headed.
Tullio

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