Sean Lahman: Rochester firm reaches milestone for James Webb Space Telescope
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Exelis works on James Webb Space Telescope: Engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center test a robotic-like fixture that will place the primary mirror segments of the Webb Telescope onto the telescopes back plane. Credit: NASA.
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NASA scientists and engineers from Rochester’s ITT Exelis have reached an important milestone. Last week, they successfully tested the placement of the large mirrors aboard the James Webb Space Telescope.
In planning since 1996, the Webb telescope will succeed the Hubble Space Telescope in helping scientists study the birth of galaxies and the formation of stars. Webb is scheduled to launch in 2018.
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Eighteen individual pieces will be assembled to form a mirror that is 21.3 feet in diameter. Engineers precisely placed together each piece, but had the extra challenge of making sure they hold during violent take-offs and under extreme cold of space.
In a video posted to the NASA website, Exelis engineer John Amon shows how the feat was accomplished at a clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He said the goal was to prove they could do the complex assembly once the actual components were ready.
“We’re doing a demonstration using the entire system to place a surrogate mirror on a surrogate backplane, just like we will in 2015; place the real mirrors on the real James Webb Space Telescope,” Amon said.
Doing it on Earth is one thing, but trying 940,000 miles away is another thing altogether. Exelis engineers developed something called COCOA – or the Center of Curvature Optical Assembly. It’s a piece of equipment that will help ensure the alignment of the components when the telescope is halfway between the Earth and the Sun.
COCOA was built by Exelis here in Rochester and was successfully tested at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Engineers at Exelis are responsible for integrating a variety of components to form the optical telescope, which will gather visible light to produce high-resolution images of deep space.
They also developed the Focal Plane Assembly package on the Near-Infrared Spectrograph detector, which will help take a variety of measurements of distant galaxies.
The folks at Exelis, located at the Rochester Tech Park in Gates, have also been involved in a number of recent space-related projects, including the Geo-Eye and IKONOS commercial imaging satellites.
Lahman’s patents column appears on Sundays. Follow him on Twitter @SeanLahman, or reach him at (585) 258-2369.
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