Engineers worked meticulously to implant the James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument into the ISIM, or Integrated Science
Instrument Module, in the cleanroom at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Photo: NASA/Chris Gunn
the European Spaceport located near Kourou,
French Guiana, in 2018.
The program has not been without its own
share of problems and was nearly cancelled
by the United States House of Representatives’
appropriations committee on Commerce, Justice,
and Science in 2011, citing ”billions of dollars over
budget and plagued by poor management”
Size comparison of Hubble and Webb primary mirrors.
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Image: NASA
as the reasoning behind killing the program.
Congress, however, reversed the cancellation
plans and instead capped additional funding
to complete the project at $8 billion – four times
more expensive than originally proposed, with a
new launch date at least seven years later than
originally planned.
“Having the final mirror segments at Goddard is
an exciting program milestone. It’s the culmination
of more than a decade of advanced optics
manufacturing and testing work by teams of
extremely dedicated engineers, technicians and
scientists,” said Eric Smith, acting program director
and program scientist for the Webb Telescope at
NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These mirrors
are ready to meet up with the structure that will
hold them incredibly stable, forming Webb’s
6.5-meter-diameter primary mirror – the largest
space telescope ever built.”
The flight-ready mirrors, built by Ball Aerospace
and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colo.,
began arriving at Goddard in the fall of 2012.
The hexagon-shape of the mirrors, with 18 mirror
segments making up one giant primary mirror,
was no accident either – it was an intentional
design because there is no rocket in the world
large enough to loft a 6.5-meter mirror into space,
www.RocketSTEM.org