NASA James Webb Space Telescope Takes New Year Break After Sunshield Takes Shape

After successfully extending booms for the spacecraft's sunshield, NASA takes a one-day pause in the James Webb Space Telescope deployment.

NASA stated on Jan. 1 that it will wait a day before tensioning the five-layer sunshield, putting it into its final form, and ensuring the layers are isolated from one another. The project, which is now set to resume on Jan. 2, will take two days to complete.

"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," NASA said in a statement.

This is also the one-week anniversary of the observatory's long-awaited Christmas-morning debut, Space.com said.

NASA James Webb Space Telescope Sunshield Finally Takes Shape

After working late into the night on Dec. 31 to lengthen two "mid-boom" structures on either side of the spacecraft, mission management included the stop in the sunshield deployment. SciTechDaily said the booms carefully expanded the sunshield to its maximum extent.

When sensors detected that a sunshield cover had not fully folded up, the operation began late. Controllers chose to proceed with the boom deployment since additional data, such as temperature sensors and gyroscopes, pointed to the removed cover.

The operations team moved forward with care and according to the rules they drew up for coping with unanticipated scenarios. Thus the deployments took longer than intended today.

The two mid-boom arms have now been secured into place. As the crew moves on to the last stage of the sunshield's deployment, tensioning, they will keep the membranes in place.

Following the break, the crew will separate and tension each of the five sunshield layers individually, stretching them into their final, taut shape. This creates room between the membranes, allowing heat to escape and making each subsequent layer of the sunshield cooler than the one before it.

What's Next After Unfolding JWST's Sunshield

The next phase in the marathon is to separate the sunshield's five membranes, a process NASA refers to as "tensioning," which will take two days. It was supposed to start today and end tomorrow, but it will now start tomorrow and end Monday (Jan. 3), assuming all goes as planned.

The successful tensioning of the sunshield will bring the deployment procedure for this critical component of JWST to a close. After the tensioning is completed, the agency plans to conduct a news conference. According to a NASA schedule documenting the deployment procedure, the observatory will subsequently unfurl its secondary mirror.

JWST was more than 475,000 miles (760,000 kilometers) from its final station in orbit around what astronomers call Earth-sun Lagrange point 2, or L2. As of today at 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT), JWST was more than halfway through its long journey to its the last station in orbit around what scientists call Earth-sun Lagrange point 2, or L2.

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