The rocket is meant to be as reliable as possible and is therefore based, in large part, on legacy hardware from NASA’s Space Shuttle program. The first, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), is ready and waiting at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its inaugural uncrewed voyage around the moon this summer as part of the Artemis I mission-the opening shot in NASA’s plan to return humans to the lunar surface in the 2020s. Each should ultimately exceed the power of the mighty Saturn V, which sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. You can do it on the ground.”Īs chance would have it, two such rockets are currently sitting on launchpads.
But with a larger rocket, “you don’t have to unfold in space. “We were worried about the unfolding,” says John Blevins of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Yet the experience left many astronomers wondering if there was a simpler way to build and launch telescopes of this size. Ultimately those efforts were successful, and the telescope has started returning some of its first calibration images to thrilled audiences back on Earth.
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JWST would not fit into any modern rocket without being folded, and it had to rely on hundreds of moving parts to unfurl to full size once in space. Getting the $10-billion telescope up and running following its launch on Christmas Day 2021 had been a nerve-racking affair. Astronomers breathed a collective sigh of relief as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sprung to life.
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