NASA personnel are spending the day studying the power subsystem of the massive James Webb Space Telescope to ensure the spacecraft is ready to execute a key procedure.
, the process that separates and smooths the five delicate layers of the kite-shaped sun deflector.
"We've spent 20 years on the ground with Webb, designing, developing, and testing," Mike Menzel, Webb's lead systems engineer at GSFC said in the same statement."We've had a week to see how the observatory actually behaves in space. It's not uncommon to learn certain characteristics of your spacecraft once you're in flight. That's what we're doing right now.
Tensioning the sunshield is a complex process that NASA expects to take two days. NASA initially intended to start the work on Saturday, butAnd when mission managers decided to take a closer look at the motor temperatures, they didn't want the team to be working on two aspects of the observatory at once.
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