This thing is a cathedral of modernity in every sense. It is in service of Science, and in itself an act of faith in the Powers of Science and Engineering. It is marvellous.
I was waiting for Sagan to say, “A space telescope that will allow mankind to see millions and billions of stars in the innumerable cosmos.”
I’m going to have to watch the launch replay with the kids tomorrow. It’s 0225 and I just finished playing Santa. The cookies were good.
Weather is looking OK, 11 minutes to launch.
2 minutes!
Go Ariane! Go JWST!
Perfect launch. Lets hope deployment goes as smoothly.
Perfect launch, separation, and solar panels are deployed.
343 deployment steps left!
It remains incredibly tense until we get first light
Good tracking site, with current progress plus preview of the various deployment stages to come:
That it does, in a week or so we’ll know more…
I’ve been checking this side daily, shows the progress of the deployment process:
So far it’s going very well
Edit: Just realized @fearlessfrog has posted it just two posts up
Too tense to tense, so they’re taking a day off:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/01/01/webb-sunshield-tensioning-to-begin-tomorrow/
Yeah, I am watching that site, too. So slow and yet so thrilling!
Some of those fine adjustment motors are literally working at the pace of grass growing. Fascinating.
Sunshield deployment complete👍
Watched part of the livestream, was pretty cool to see the live reactions when it was confirmed.
Amazing. We’re at about 75% through the single points of failure. This thing might just go off as planned!
Yep, looks good so far.
Fingers crossed that the rest will go as smoothly.
Aaand port primary mirror wing has been deployed and latched.
Tomorrow they want to do the starboard wing and then it’s fully deployed.
Instruments will start cooling down and they’ll move the mirror segments into position before arriving at L2 in about 10 days.
Then the agonizing wait for everything to cool down begins xD
So I misread this as “port primary mirror wing has been destroyed” and my heart sank, heh…
Unfolding all done. Amazing
Incredible. Everything went without any major issues so far (I believe there was a small problem with some sensors initially but they fixed it pretty quickly).
Truly amazing. Can’t wait for the science that is going to come out of this!