LIVE! Mirror Movement Starts Today! - James Webb Tracker! #NASA #WEBB

This morning I posted an update to the James Webb Space Telescope and was just about to hit the post update and BLAM my Chrome Browser just crashed!!! This just started happening within the last two or three weeks... Is anyone else experiencing this? And if so, what action have you taken to fix it...

Anyway, my post dealt with the temperature on both the Hot side and the Cold side of the JWST... Why is that important, you might ask... The warm side is the side where the Sun shield is located...and this is important, because without the shield, the temperature of the JWST would be too high for it to operate successfully... Right now, as I type this, the Hot side temperature at points labeled (A) is 130° F and for points labeled (B) the temperature is 51° F... Now both of those temperatures are not exceedingly HOT, but could but the JWST out of commission if not for the Sunshield... Now on the Cold side, which is the side where the operational telescope is, is currently -306°F at the points labeled (C) and at points labeled (D) the temperature is a rather chilly -329° ( See the image in the lower left corner of the video for clarification on the points.)

This is a crucial part of the JWST in that in order to operate successfully at the infrared frequency level, the JWST must be COLD, as in minus 300° or greater...

1st, the "Sunshield is a critical part of the Webb telescope because the infrared cameras and instruments aboard must be kept very cold and out of the sun's heat and light to function properly. The highly-reflective aluminum surfaces also bounce the remaining energy out of the gaps at the sunshield layer's edges."

Further, "since Webb observes infrared light, or heat, it has to be kept at extremely cold temperatures so that there is no heat from Webb that could obscure its observations. By reflecting both incoming solar radiation and heat from planet Earth, the sunshield keeps Webb perfectly cold."

There us a litany of scientific reasons why this is necessary, but suffice it to say that without the Sunshield section, the JWST would be a useless piece of space junk, a very very expensive piece of space junk...

Today, scientists and engineers are testing and calibrating Mirror segment movements, so that each segment focuses on a single point, in order for the mirrors to bring in a focused image and not a multiplicity of image fragments... The animation in the lower center will provide you the detail behind the task in progress...

Oh, and by the way, the JWST has now completed 80.85% of its journey to Lagrange Point L2... now only 172,000 miles away and counting down!

I do hope that you find these updates worthwhile and informative...
Kerry
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