NASA prepares to fuel James Webb telescope for Dec. 18 launch

NASA is in the final stages of preparation to launch the nearly $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, an engineering marvel that may reveal secrets of time and the universe, from South America on Dec. 18.

Technicians are preparing to load the space observatory with fuel that will power it for up to 13 years as it orbits the sun about one million miles from Earth, NASA officials said Tuesday in a press conference.

The telescope will have to deploy a massive solar shield the size of a tennis court to keep its infrared instrument cold enough to see billions of light years in the distance.

"James Webb was designed with very lofty goals in mind to look back in time 13.5 billion years to see the first galaxies formed in the universe," said BegoÃ±a Vila, NASA's Webb instrument systems engineer.

The spacecraft will also "look at the first stars -- the first light in the universe -- which were 300 times more massive than our sun," she said.

The telescope's powerful infrared instruments are designed to see more clearly and a few hundred million light years farther than the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990.

Hubble's most distant observation was the galaxy GN-z11, about 32 billion light years away, but the image was faint.

The new telescope is a joint project with the space agencies of Europe, France and Canada. The European contribution to the mission is to launch the 14,300-pound observatory, from the European Space Agency's Guiana Space Center.

NASA has packed and folded the telescope for launch like origami folded paper art, said Alphonso Stewart, Webb deployment systems lead.

Deploying all of it in space will be like "origami in reverse, meaning that it will unfold in a certain sequence," Stewart said. The process will take almost a month, after which NASA will spend another five months testing sensors and systems before routine science can begin.

"The solar array ... is the only sort of automatic release system that we have," he said. "The rest of the deployment is all ground commands, meaning that we will take our time and we send the command from the ground and wait for confirmation that it occurred."

James Webb has 344 single-point failure items, or devices that can break or stick, and 80 percent are associated with deployment, according to NASA.

If something goes wrong, James Webb is not serviceable like Hubble, which is much closer to Earth and has been fixed or updated five times by astronauts on spacewalks. Most of the instruments and features of the telescope have backups to switch on if they fail, Stewart said.

Instead of traveling to visit the scope, NASA would attempt to solve any glitches using "shimmy, twirl, or fire and ice" techniques, he said.

Those terms refer to shaking the craft, spinning it or allowing it to expand and contract by exposing it to the sun in an attempt to dislodge or reactivate any features that aren't working, Stewart said.

Engineers also have attempted to account for damage from space debris or micrometeorites, said Mike Menzel, Webb lead mission systems engineer.

"We anticipated micrometeoroid degradation on both the sunshield and the primary mirror," Menzel said. "The micrometeoroids, when they hit the mirror, will put nice little well-defined bullet holes in it."

But the damage shouldn't make a significant impact on the telescope's science abilities, he said.

"We built a world class infrared telescope. We built it, we've aligned it, we've tested it, we've proved it works, and now we're going to have to break it up, fold it up, and actually rebuild it on orbit," Menzel said.

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