- So, right now, we are standing in front
of the big clean room and this is actually
the largest clean room in it's class
in the world.
And inside, at last, finally,
the pieces that have
been worked on for years
to create the James Webb Space Telescope
are really starting to come together.
(techno music)
- [Voiceover] The James
Webb Space Telescope
is a feat of cooperative engineering.
It's an international
partnership with physical pieces,
engineering work, and transportation
being coordinated among multiple teams
around the globe.
And this piece of
equipment has some complex
travel needs both on Earth and in space.
And one man has to run the show
to make sure all of the
various teams contributing
to the project are working
from the same playbook.
And for the JWST, that's
project manager, Bill Ochs,
He spoke with us a NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center
to explain, not only how
all of the various pieces
of the project will come together,
but also what will happen
once the JWST is completed
and ready for it's journey
to out Lagrange point two.
He also let us in on some
of the unique challenges
that come with building and launching
a super-powered telescope.
- So, what about the
JWST specs is, to you,
the most impressive part of it?
Like, what part do you
still just shake your head
and go I can't believe we achieved this?
- It's really big.
(laughter)
I mean there's a lot of
technical specs that,
that are very difficult to achieve
from both a thermal standpoint,
because you look at this model
because we're in infrared, we
have to be kept really cold,
but when you look at the
overall size of JWST,
it's bigger than anything NASA's built
as a satellite goes.
Our primary mirror is about
21, 22 feet in diameter.
It takes 7 of Hubble's
mirrors to make up our mirror.
So, there's a lot of challenges with,
first of all, you have
to fold this thing up
and put it inside a rocket.
And this itself, from
the bottom to the top,
is over three stories high
and it's about the size of a tennis court
going this way.
That won't fit into a rocket
so it all has to fold up.
Over the first two and
half weeks, three weeks,
of the mission, once we're on orbit,
all this has to unfold.
Each time we unfold, we
call it a deployment.
We have about 180 of those
that all have to work
in the first two and a half weeks.
So when you combine all
of those things together
with the technical performance,
it makes it a very challenging mission.
I mean this mission started,
in earnest,
back in mid-90's.
And we've been having hardware built
all over the world.
Right now, it's just all starting
to come together here in Northrop.
So what you see in the
clean room, right now,
is what the structure you see in there
is what we call the
backplane of the telescope.
The backplane in this
model would be this black
that you see back here, as well as,
the structure that supports
our secondary mirror.
This is a composite graphite structure
that was delivered to
us from Northrop Grumman
over the summer,
and we are now preparing
to put on the mirrors to,
we actually started
assembling the telescope.
So the first mirror segment
will go on this weekend.
The primary mirror is made of 18 segments,
so we'll be putting them on
over the next few months.
And in the April timeframe,
we will actually start
integrating the telescope, itself,
with our scientific instruments.
While we're doing all this
here and doing some testing
at Johnson Space Center,
our observatory contractor,
Northrop Grummond, are putting
together the sunshield.
And if you'll underneath,
the actual what we call the Spacecraft bus
that basically holds all
our electronics boxes,
our solar panels for power,
antennas for communication, and so on.
Because we are so big, any
moving of anything around
is always a challenge.
- Right.
- In addition, we are an
international partnership mission.
So, two of our instruments come
from the European Space Agency,
one comes from the Canadian Space Agency.
But in addition, the European Space Agency
provides the rocket to get to space.
So, we don't launch out
of Kennedy Space Center,
we actually launch out of
Kourou French Guiana in South America.
So, obviously, the
challenge is how do I get
from California over to Kourou?
And you would normally think,
well I go on a C-5 plane,
it's a really big plane, we should fit,
but we don't really fit
and if we did the problem
we really have down at Kourou
is you have the airfield
and then where the launch site
is, there are seven bridges.
And, JWST is so massive and weighs so much
that the bridges there
would not support us.
So, we cannot rebuild the
infrastructure of a country
so we will actually go on a boat
from Long Beach in California
down through the Panama
Canal and then up to Kourou.
- So you get a cruise out of the deal?
- Yeah, no it's not a cruise.
(laughter)
- It's a cargo ship with
just a few folks going on it.
So, not really a cruise.
- So, I know it's super exciting
because even just being here today,
we've heard lots of staff members wanting
to be on-hand when things
really start to get going.
So, I can only imagine how
excited you are about it.
- It's excellent, I mean,
this is the best part
of the program.
This is where all those years
of putting things on paper
and designing all start to come together
and you've got real pieces of hardware
that are slowly building up
and we're at the point now
where we're putting
the big pieces together
and then testing it to
make sure it all works.
- So, now knowing how much
work and collaboration
and cooperation has gone into this,
and what an incredible,
just feat of humanity,
it is, I cannot wait until
the October 2018 launch.
And I hope that you too are
really excited about it.
And if you are and you want to know more,
stick with us at HowStuffWorks.com
because we're going to
keep covering the JWST
as it goes through all
of its mission phases.
So, come and see us there.
(bing sound)
