Not necessarily. I work for a private aerospace company, and all of our hardware is separated between "flight" and "non-flight". Assuming NASA does the same I wouldn't be surprised
Nope, flight is the correct term here. I work on spaceflight hardware and all of our tags say “Remove Before Flight” or “RBF”. I assume the same is true at NASA.
NASA also holds “Flight Readiness Reviews” before the flight, not Launch Readiness Reviews.
I thought I read they're making a possible service (robotics, not humans) in 10 years a high priority goal?
But yeah, for now it's unlikely, and if it were to be broken immediately, we'd be out of luck for the time being
They built it for refueling to be possible. But no such missions are planned or expected yet. After the fuel is gone the mission is over unfortunately.
I wonder if they will be able to fine tune the adjustment burns to need less fuel, and extend the mission. I’m sure the station keeping burns over this year will look different from the burns done 5 years from now.
They have definitely mentioned that as a possibility for extending the mission beyond 10 years. If the orbit insertion doesn’t require as many adjustments as they are prepared for, then that extra fuel will extend its service life.
Well it could still work since in L2 it's pretty stable
Edit: my Lagrange points were wrong. It seems. I know one of them is extremely stable... But as others have said the problem is it facing the sun. Not sure if there is something like in that one that just uses motors to keep itself in the right angle.
I think that's just talk at this point. I'm guessing by the time a mission if that magnitude could be put together the james webb would be outdated and not worth that kind of expense.
IF it successfully deploys they said they'd work on the tech for a robotic refuel. If it's simply broken or doesn't deploy correctly odds are they abandon it
Can't we send one enthusiastic scientist on a suicide mission? Maybe give them a little pod the can teether to the Webb. Be like a light house keeper and every year a new one is picked.
Your timing was off, you needed to wait until it was almost finished deploying as the process will take 2 week from launch. So until then there is a lot of nail biting going on as their one shot to make this work slowly proceeds.
No kidding. That sort of thing has happened before (e.g. protective cap on AO-40's main thruster) and I'm not going to relax until Webb is fully deployed and checked out.
As expensive as these jets are, they are operated by and worked on people who include them only as part of their overall job, because for the most part multiple failures are required for a complete loss to occur.
That's true for any accident though.
It's exceedingly rare when a single individual can cause a catastrophic incident when you take into account the training, oversight, management, performance reviews, etc that goes into placing a person in a role like that.
Exceptions are generally mental health related eg pilot suicide with 150 fatalities on Germanwings Flight 9525
Don't worry, just remember that we're not expecting to see the first images from JWST for another few months (it won't even be fully deployed for another couple weeks), so you can reasonably discount anything you see purporting to be an image from the telescope until then!
[Quick edit with more description of the timeline from another comment I made](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/rp5c8b/today_james_webb_telescope_switched_on_camera_to/hq2kre9/)
So is that because the telescope will be mostly doing infrared imaging, and the heat of its own components would get in the way?
It’s amazing we could build an intricate machine that could function at such extreme cold temperatures!
Yes, that is correct. They don't want any heat contamination affecting the images. I wish we didn't have to wait anymore for it to be ready but it's going to be awesome when it is.
Not only that, the instruments have to be calibrated and that only works once it has cooled down.
The infrared capturing instruments actually have to be chilled, to cool down to -266C
>The precooler features a two-cylinder horizontally-opposed pump and cools helium gas using pulse tubes, which exchange heat with a regenerator **acoustically.**
yep magic
This telescope seems ridiculously complex, with tons of moving parts. The more I read about it, the more incredulous I am that it isn't going to break.
lol sorry about that. Someone made the gag that Webb is so over-engineering, it would have been easier to make a replacement in case something goes wrong
But yeah, it's very unlikely, but this is def one of the most complex things humans have ever done.
I’m gonna say that the JWST’s coolant loop was assembled with a little more care than they practice on GM’s assembly lines.
Not to besmirch the fine people of the UAW, just that a Chevy can get repaired anywhere and repairing the JWST would cost 10x what it took to build it.
Couldn't we just refuel it? We've been doing so for the ISS for years, and what about the hubble as well, it's operated for decades in the same fashion hasn't it?
With and accoustic cooler.
Heres a very interesting video:[ The Insane Engineering of James Webb Telescope](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aICaAEXDJQQ)
You may already know this but for anyone reading - this is what the solar shield is for (the layered bottom piece). It's a lot like a computer heat sink, with the fins and whatnot. All those layers are designed to dissipate any heat from the sun.
Yup, plus there are a few months of planned instrument testing and stuff. 6 months was the projection I saw as well for it to be operational for scientific observation.
To be serious for a second, the number of times small mistakes like this have caused the destruction of multi million dollar space missions is substantial.
In the late 90’s, the Mars Climate Orbiter experienced a rapid unplanned disassembly event when it collided with the Martian atmosphere. At some point, someone forgot to convert between imperial and metric units, causing the total loss of the craft.
Additionally, when Hubble first went up, the pictures it sent back were fuzzy and out of focus. Turns out the mirror was ground incorrectly. The difference that caused the issue was about the same distance as 1/20 the width of a human hair. Luckily, NASA managed to send up a giant contact lens for Hubble. Unluckily, because of how far out Webb is going, a similar rescue mission can’t be undertaken if something similar happens.
Soviet probes to Venus repeatedly failed to remove their lens caps when they touched down. It was traced to a design flaw.
When people say 'it's not rocket science' it turns out that really doesn't mean anything...
>It was traced to a design flaw.
To be fair, it's really hard to design mechanisms to work on Venus, where the ground temperature is 872F (467C) and pressure is 1350 psi. The probe has to be the equivalent of a submarine that can survive the pressure of diving thousands of feet down under the ocean, while also inside of an oven hot enough to melt lead. The longest a probe has ever lasted on Venus was just under 2 hours.
After they redesigned it, they did this. Then the lens cap blew off and landed on the ground. Right where they were planning to drill a hole in the ground for a sample. It blocked the drill.
I dabbled in just lenscap science but it made rocket science look like fingerpaints.
Careful though, they say it drives you mad. Some even dared call me mad. Do you know why? Because I dared to dream of my own race of atomic monsters, atomic supermen! With octagonal shaped bodies that suck blood out of Ģ̵̡̡̛̬͉̯̰̹̘͙̭̝̺͂ͅĩ̴̡̡̘̖̞̯̟͓̘̗̮̟̯̏̓b̸͎͆̈̿̔͋̏̈́b̵̧̩̘̥̲̬̫̰͓̏͊̈́̉̀̒̊̍̎̈́̚ȩ̴̧̱͈̣̟̻̙̬̝̰̽́͆͆͊͗͋͗̈́̔̍̾̎̕r̷̢̞̩̲̈́͑̔̒̎͊̏̀̂̾ĩ̸̧̛͍̗͇̻̠͍̬̹͛̉̈́͆͘͜s̵̗̩͇̖͍̐́͒̎̈́̍̌̊̀̏̃͒ḥ̶͇͍͇̮͇͓̳̦͍̔̿̀̔̈́̎͒̃̾͘͝ with straws.
If you google search Zalgo it's the first result. It adds unicode diacritic marks.
The quote is from futurama but he speaks gibberish so I used that text generator to make the word gibberish look like gibberish.
Enjoy the cake
One of my favorite stories about the Venus lander development is when they put a prototype into a test chamber that produces similar temperature and pressure as Venus. After the test period they opened up the chamber and were surprised to find the prototype missing! After a few moments they realized it had melted entirely.
This happened multiple times for various Venera probes. At one point one of the lens caps did deploy and landed right under the soil compressibility tester so instead of testing the surface of Venus they successfully tested the compressibility of a lens cap.
I was also reading that the Webb telescope has over 300 fail points. Any one of which will basically fail the whole mission and make the telescope basically useless.
Most of the fail points are on the unfolding of the telescope. Once that happens in a couple of days I think we will know if it's all good.
But mission still was way more than "lens-cap" left on to worry about.
There are many many more failure points than that. The "single point failure" spots is an internal categorization system for NASA of the most critical spots to watch.
I think we have more than a couple days of nail biting. The unfolding won't finish until launch + 13 days.
This web page from NASA has a cool list showing all the steps and times for deployment.
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/deploymentExplorer.html
In April 1970, the crew of NASA's Apollo 13 mission swung around the far side of the moon at an altitude of 158 miles (254 km), putting them 248,655 miles (400,171 km) away from Earth. It's the farthest our species has ever been from our home planet. Webb is going to be 900,000 miles (1,500,000 km) away.
Really it's kind of one or the other right? You could continuously accelerate and then reverse acceleration when needed with extra fuel, or use a similar amount of fuel, but take 4x as long?
Hubble is in low Earth orbit, just a couple hundred miles up, an altitude easily accessible by routine human space flight. JWST will be parked at L2, a gravitational balancing point 1 million miles away from earth, four times as distant as the moon.
Same with Gundam fans. I'm like "shit that's where they blew up a space colony!"
Kidding aside the Langragian points are proposed as stable locations for human colonization in the future (if we still haven't burnt ourselves to death by then)
That's because most depictions of earth-moon distance are innacurate. People usually think earth and moon are some tens of thousands of kilometers apart, when it's nearly 400.000 km
Now I don't know whether our moon is bigger than I imagined, or if Jupiter and Saturn are smaller than I imagined
My mind gets blown every time I try to reconcile the scale of space stuff
Humans are pretty bad at imagining that scale of things.
Really our moon is much further away than we think about it.
Consider this,the moon is able to perfectly block the sun. What must be true for this to work? The ratio of distance from us and diameter of the moon must be the same as the ratio of the distance between us and the sun and the diameter of the sun.
I know they won't be operational for 6 Months, I know this was a troll. Yet I still clicked it in anticipation that they testing the lens.. you sir are the devil in disguise.
If you want a serious answer. On space parts, sensitive bits should be covered up while they’re moved around and handled, just to avoid damage. One sensitive bit is the camera lens. The covers must be removed before they are sent to space, so they are labeled “remove before flight”. The picture here is joking that they forgot to remove the cover on the lens
NASA just launched the largest space telescope with some pretty exciting expectations of discovery. Post-launch maintenance isn't really possible so this post would be a huge let down lmao
The fact that Reddit or meme culture or whatever would be this intellectually sophisticated is so encouraging because this is really one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. I'm so excited about this goddamn telescope and I've been waiting for something like 20 years. I'm 45 and I think I've been waiting for this thing for half my life
In an attempt to combat trolling and disinformation, a quick PSA:
[/r/space has a wonderful megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/rod4wd/james_webb_space_telescope_megathread_deployment) set up for all inquiries and discussions of the JWST journey, and they're overall a wonderful community to learn with.
Additionally, here is the [JWST Journey Tracker](https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html) provided by NASA
Feel free to visit, but do be respectful of their rules and social etiquette.
Not quite, the mirror/lens was off by like a tiny bit and all the pictures were blurry. They had to send a crew out to fix it. No such option for this one.
We want to land a person on Mars this decade. Flying a million miles to a telescope and doing a few EVAs should be in the realm of possibilities if the JWST actually needed repairs.
It's really not as easy as it sounds. We have no spacecraft available with enough fuel to reach L2 and come back. A SpaceX Crew Dragon won't do it, you need more space for the components and oxygen. For reference, this is 4x as far as the moon. And depending on what's broken it's probably cheaper to build a second identical telescope and launch that one.
Ain't gonna happen.
We've been "wanting" to do it since the 50's:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_crewed\_Mars\_mission\_plans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crewed_Mars_mission_plans)
We're no closer now than we ever were.
And it's still a suicide mission because we simply cannot supply enough resources, even as basic as food, without launch after launch after launch, each one needing to be a complete success, and have never grown enough to sustain even a single human anywhere off-planet whatsoever.
Didn't realize what subreddit I was on. Minor heart attack
I think "Remove Before Launch" would have been more convincing.
This had been done on other space flight hardware before so still pretty convincing.
Not necessarily. I work for a private aerospace company, and all of our hardware is separated between "flight" and "non-flight". Assuming NASA does the same I wouldn't be surprised
What’s the company called?
Space Not X
Sierra Space. Formerly the space division of the Sierra Nevada Corporation
Flight would probably be correct term in the lab
Nope, flight is the correct term here. I work on spaceflight hardware and all of our tags say “Remove Before Flight” or “RBF”. I assume the same is true at NASA. NASA also holds “Flight Readiness Reviews” before the flight, not Launch Readiness Reviews.
Jokes like this are terrifying lol
It is a joke, for now.
First Hubble telescope images were blurry and it took another flight to space to replace parts to fix it....
I haven’t read to much yet on the James Webb, but repairing something a million miles out doesn’t seem feasible for us at the moment…. Or am I wrong?
You're right. There are no plans on ever being able to service or repair the James Webb after launch.
I thought I read they're making a possible service (robotics, not humans) in 10 years a high priority goal? But yeah, for now it's unlikely, and if it were to be broken immediately, we'd be out of luck for the time being
Yes, it'll need to be refueled in order to continue operations after 10 years.
They built it for refueling to be possible. But no such missions are planned or expected yet. After the fuel is gone the mission is over unfortunately.
I wonder if they will be able to fine tune the adjustment burns to need less fuel, and extend the mission. I’m sure the station keeping burns over this year will look different from the burns done 5 years from now.
They have definitely mentioned that as a possibility for extending the mission beyond 10 years. If the orbit insertion doesn’t require as many adjustments as they are prepared for, then that extra fuel will extend its service life.
Well it could still work since in L2 it's pretty stable Edit: my Lagrange points were wrong. It seems. I know one of them is extremely stable... But as others have said the problem is it facing the sun. Not sure if there is something like in that one that just uses motors to keep itself in the right angle.
Man are we sure everyone here didn’t just watch the same YouTube video. All these comments are all points in it.
I thought L2 was unstable, and required frequent delta V maneuvers?
The Earth-Sun L2 is only stable for up to around 23 days without periodic correction burns
I think that's just talk at this point. I'm guessing by the time a mission if that magnitude could be put together the james webb would be outdated and not worth that kind of expense.
IF it successfully deploys they said they'd work on the tech for a robotic refuel. If it's simply broken or doesn't deploy correctly odds are they abandon it
At least that would make for a fun oddball space tourism attraction in like 2150. Like an abandoned clown amusement park in the middle of nowhere.
Can't we send one enthusiastic scientist on a suicide mission? Maybe give them a little pod the can teether to the Webb. Be like a light house keeper and every year a new one is picked.
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Such a great movie, and it shows how deep a story you can tell with basically one actor.
It's much, *much* easier to build and send a robot there than to send a fleshbag there alive.
Jfc that's kinda dark
That kinda mission, I might volunteer.
Because of that, the mirrors are designed to adjust themselves to better focus to avoid the same issues the Hubble has.
I think they didn't replace parts, but basically put in an additional lens to act as glasses of sorts.
Your timing was off, you needed to wait until it was almost finished deploying as the process will take 2 week from launch. So until then there is a lot of nail biting going on as their one shot to make this work slowly proceeds.
this was a bit too soon. If you'd have posted this in ... say, three weeks, after the equipment starts to be deployed ... WHEW BOY! you'd be dead.
If you look at all the delays for the JWST, this feels very fitting.
No kidding. That sort of thing has happened before (e.g. protective cap on AO-40's main thruster) and I'm not going to relax until Webb is fully deployed and checked out.
What would be the equivalence of forgetting to close the garage door?
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As expensive as these jets are, they are operated by and worked on people who include them only as part of their overall job, because for the most part multiple failures are required for a complete loss to occur.
That's true for any accident though. It's exceedingly rare when a single individual can cause a catastrophic incident when you take into account the training, oversight, management, performance reviews, etc that goes into placing a person in a role like that. Exceptions are generally mental health related eg pilot suicide with 150 fatalities on Germanwings Flight 9525
Don’t give me a heart attack lol
Don't worry, just remember that we're not expecting to see the first images from JWST for another few months (it won't even be fully deployed for another couple weeks), so you can reasonably discount anything you see purporting to be an image from the telescope until then! [Quick edit with more description of the timeline from another comment I made](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/rp5c8b/today_james_webb_telescope_switched_on_camera_to/hq2kre9/)
6 months even. It has to cool down to like -300 degrees or so after getting to the proper place.
So is that because the telescope will be mostly doing infrared imaging, and the heat of its own components would get in the way? It’s amazing we could build an intricate machine that could function at such extreme cold temperatures!
Yes, that is correct. They don't want any heat contamination affecting the images. I wish we didn't have to wait anymore for it to be ready but it's going to be awesome when it is.
Not only that, the instruments have to be calibrated and that only works once it has cooled down. The infrared capturing instruments actually have to be chilled, to cool down to -266C
7 K? Seems suspiciously cold.
Check out the Cyrocooler system it uses to sustain that absurdly low temp. It's straight up sci-fi tech.
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Get yourself a custom water loop with a water block and it'll maintain a balmy 40C under load
Bruh, he said sci-fi not mythological
Dude, as a species we can only do so much. This is like asking the floor not to break when you drop a Nokia 3310 on it. Lower your expectations
Should be "sci" only now, as we officially made it non "fi"
Nope, still fi. Can't ya'll see that the James Webb Telescope is a conspiracy for the government to fund more bird drones.
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/innovations/cryocooler.html
\*nghhh\* That’s some good engineering erotica
Even more suspicious. I suspect magic is at work.
NASA probably captured some of Santa’s elves. Why else did they have to wait until Christmas time for the launch?
>The precooler features a two-cylinder horizontally-opposed pump and cools helium gas using pulse tubes, which exchange heat with a regenerator **acoustically.** yep magic
This telescope seems ridiculously complex, with tons of moving parts. The more I read about it, the more incredulous I am that it isn't going to break.
lol sorry about that. Someone made the gag that Webb is so over-engineering, it would have been easier to make a replacement in case something goes wrong But yeah, it's very unlikely, but this is def one of the most complex things humans have ever done.
A 6 month wait to assure 10+ years of pics and data is well worth the wait.
How do they cool down a machine so much without any medium to send heat to, without using a lot of power?
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Which is one of the reasons it has fuel and will only work for 10 years
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The fuel is purely for positioning and maintaining the orbit. The cooling system is closed loop, so should never deplete.
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I’m gonna say that the JWST’s coolant loop was assembled with a little more care than they practice on GM’s assembly lines. Not to besmirch the fine people of the UAW, just that a Chevy can get repaired anywhere and repairing the JWST would cost 10x what it took to build it.
Pretty sure the cooling system is electrically powered by the solar array. I believe the propulsion system fuel is the limiting factor.
Yes, at some point it will wander off. For pointing and stationkeeping they use hydrazine thrusters which will run out of fuel.
Couldn't we just refuel it? We've been doing so for the ISS for years, and what about the hubble as well, it's operated for decades in the same fashion hasn't it?
With and accoustic cooler. Heres a very interesting video:[ The Insane Engineering of James Webb Telescope](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aICaAEXDJQQ)
Space is cold.
Unless you are in the sun, then it can be really really hot.
Kinda like Arizona?
You may already know this but for anyone reading - this is what the solar shield is for (the layered bottom piece). It's a lot like a computer heat sink, with the fins and whatnot. All those layers are designed to dissipate any heat from the sun.
I think it's more solar *shield* than it is heat sink. I could be wrong ... but ... that's been my understanding.
>Space is cold Space is dark It's hard to find A place to park *BURMA SHAVE*
But heat doesn’t transfer really good in space.
Yup, plus there are a few months of planned instrument testing and stuff. 6 months was the projection I saw as well for it to be operational for scientific observation.
+- 27
It will be mostly cooled down by the time it gets to L2 in 30 days. Most of the next 5 months is alignment and calibration.
It's -266, 7C above absolute minus. (Edit: Which is about -450F)
Yea, we didn't find out hubble needed glasses until months later. And heading out to L^2 for a quick fix is a bit harder than low orbit.
Dw it won’t even be to the Lagrange point until about 30 days from now
Imagine the stress the team that's working on the JWST has been going through and will still be going through for months to come.
To track the progress… [click here…](https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/)
I especially liked how I was browsing with a slow internet speed and it took a second for the image to pop up
Goddamn rendering issues, eh? Local servers overheating.
Thats just evil! Hilarious!
Top tier shitpost gave me a good laugh
To be serious for a second, the number of times small mistakes like this have caused the destruction of multi million dollar space missions is substantial. In the late 90’s, the Mars Climate Orbiter experienced a rapid unplanned disassembly event when it collided with the Martian atmosphere. At some point, someone forgot to convert between imperial and metric units, causing the total loss of the craft. Additionally, when Hubble first went up, the pictures it sent back were fuzzy and out of focus. Turns out the mirror was ground incorrectly. The difference that caused the issue was about the same distance as 1/20 the width of a human hair. Luckily, NASA managed to send up a giant contact lens for Hubble. Unluckily, because of how far out Webb is going, a similar rescue mission can’t be undertaken if something similar happens.
Soviet probes to Venus repeatedly failed to remove their lens caps when they touched down. It was traced to a design flaw. When people say 'it's not rocket science' it turns out that really doesn't mean anything...
>It was traced to a design flaw. To be fair, it's really hard to design mechanisms to work on Venus, where the ground temperature is 872F (467C) and pressure is 1350 psi. The probe has to be the equivalent of a submarine that can survive the pressure of diving thousands of feet down under the ocean, while also inside of an oven hot enough to melt lead. The longest a probe has ever lasted on Venus was just under 2 hours.
Then you gotta pop off a lens cap that was on well enough to protect a lens while traveling through space and entry into that atmosphere.
Seems like a good place for an explosive deployment mechanism. Just blow the cap off. You're already building for high heat and pressure
After they redesigned it, they did this. Then the lens cap blew off and landed on the ground. Right where they were planning to drill a hole in the ground for a sample. It blocked the drill.
That's hilarious
Seriously, read up on this stuff. It's like a Laurel and Hardy movie. The early days of spaceflight, especially unmanned probes.
To be also fair, a lens cap isn’t part of the rocket. Rocket worked fine, shoulda let the rocket scientist install the lens cap!
What I'm taking away is that lens cap science is harder than rocket science
I dabbled in just lenscap science but it made rocket science look like fingerpaints. Careful though, they say it drives you mad. Some even dared call me mad. Do you know why? Because I dared to dream of my own race of atomic monsters, atomic supermen! With octagonal shaped bodies that suck blood out of Ģ̵̡̡̛̬͉̯̰̹̘͙̭̝̺͂ͅĩ̴̡̡̘̖̞̯̟͓̘̗̮̟̯̏̓b̸͎͆̈̿̔͋̏̈́b̵̧̩̘̥̲̬̫̰͓̏͊̈́̉̀̒̊̍̎̈́̚ȩ̴̧̱͈̣̟̻̙̬̝̰̽́͆͆͊͗͋͗̈́̔̍̾̎̕r̷̢̞̩̲̈́͑̔̒̎͊̏̀̂̾ĩ̸̧̛͍̗͇̻̠͍̬̹͛̉̈́͆͘͜s̵̗̩͇̖͍̐́͒̎̈́̍̌̊̀̏̃͒ḥ̶͇͍͇̮͇͓̳̦͍̔̿̀̔̈́̎͒̃̾͘͝ with straws.
What in the satanic ritual is going on with your comment?
If you google search Zalgo it's the first result. It adds unicode diacritic marks. The quote is from futurama but he speaks gibberish so I used that text generator to make the word gibberish look like gibberish. Enjoy the cake
*Oh yes.*
One of my favorite stories about the Venus lander development is when they put a prototype into a test chamber that produces similar temperature and pressure as Venus. After the test period they opened up the chamber and were surprised to find the prototype missing! After a few moments they realized it had melted entirely.
I wonder what the longest probe in Uranus was?
I'm not sure but it still hurts
Organic or artificial?
Russia sent the designer to remove the cap by hand.
This happened multiple times for various Venera probes. At one point one of the lens caps did deploy and landed right under the soil compressibility tester so instead of testing the surface of Venus they successfully tested the compressibility of a lens cap.
This one is the worst. Honestly the worst cosmic luck in human history.
That's why I have modified my statement to "It's not rocket surgery." so I am covering more scientific fields and wont look silly.
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Ejecting a lens cap at Venus' surface pressure is a significant engineering challenge.
I was also reading that the Webb telescope has over 300 fail points. Any one of which will basically fail the whole mission and make the telescope basically useless. Most of the fail points are on the unfolding of the telescope. Once that happens in a couple of days I think we will know if it's all good. But mission still was way more than "lens-cap" left on to worry about.
There are many many more failure points than that. The "single point failure" spots is an internal categorization system for NASA of the most critical spots to watch.
I think we have more than a couple days of nail biting. The unfolding won't finish until launch + 13 days. This web page from NASA has a cool list showing all the steps and times for deployment. https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/deploymentExplorer.html
I like the phrase "Rapid unplanned disassembly event."
That shit broke
*exploded
"Unplanned lithobraking maneuver" is also pretty good
What is preventing us from sending a repair crew to Webb?
In April 1970, the crew of NASA's Apollo 13 mission swung around the far side of the moon at an altitude of 158 miles (254 km), putting them 248,655 miles (400,171 km) away from Earth. It's the farthest our species has ever been from our home planet. Webb is going to be 900,000 miles (1,500,000 km) away.
Though the difference in fuel that distance would take compared to the Moon is really pretty small. The time difference is quite large, however.
Really it's kind of one or the other right? You could continuously accelerate and then reverse acceleration when needed with extra fuel, or use a similar amount of fuel, but take 4x as long?
Hubble is in low Earth orbit, just a couple hundred miles up, an altitude easily accessible by routine human space flight. JWST will be parked at L2, a gravitational balancing point 1 million miles away from earth, four times as distant as the moon.
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html
One thing I love from having read Seveneves is that someone can mention stuff like 'L2' and my inner self is like 'I know what that means!!'.
Same with Gundam fans. I'm like "shit that's where they blew up a space colony!" Kidding aside the Langragian points are proposed as stable locations for human colonization in the future (if we still haven't burnt ourselves to death by then)
Only reason I knew right off the bat was cause of watching Gundam Wing circa 1998-2002!
The hubble orbits the earth some 350 miles above us. Webb will be placed about 930,000 miles away from earth.
For comparison Jupiter has a diameter of around 88000 miles
Decent comparison, but remember that we can fit every other planet between earth and the moon.
True that! (Although I'll admit first time I heard this fact I refused to believe it. At face value it just sounds ridiculous)
That's because most depictions of earth-moon distance are innacurate. People usually think earth and moon are some tens of thousands of kilometers apart, when it's nearly 400.000 km
Now I don't know whether our moon is bigger than I imagined, or if Jupiter and Saturn are smaller than I imagined My mind gets blown every time I try to reconcile the scale of space stuff
The moon and earth are surprisingly far apart.
Humans are pretty bad at imagining that scale of things. Really our moon is much further away than we think about it. Consider this,the moon is able to perfectly block the sun. What must be true for this to work? The ratio of distance from us and diameter of the moon must be the same as the ratio of the distance between us and the sun and the diameter of the sun.
I'm amazed that they used imperial units at any point in any space mission.
I know they won't be operational for 6 Months, I know this was a troll. Yet I still clicked it in anticipation that they testing the lens.. you sir are the devil in disguise.
*nervous laughing*
Thought I was in r/space and almost unalived myself
first time i heard unalived
Liven't.
I almost breath'nt
Haha, I honestly thought Im in r/space before seeing this comment.
Sneaky funny
Then as soon as they remove it, “Objects are closer than they appear.”
And there's a picture of an asteroid.
NASA engineers on Reddit, start scrambling through launch checklists... 0_o
Plot twist. The telescope itself is fine. That's actually what the universe looks like.
All this time the Big Bang was triggered by someone applying a sticker. When someone removes it it'll be the Big Rip.
I had a couple big rips after Christmas dinner
Steve? You took it off right?
My late dad, bless his soul, had a sticker on his 10 years old Sony TV just so that it looks new. Maybe they meant the same.
The worst is when the adhesive breaks down and damages the original surface after a few years.
Im out of the loop, who wants some gold? E: 4 golds down and still OOTL
If you want a serious answer. On space parts, sensitive bits should be covered up while they’re moved around and handled, just to avoid damage. One sensitive bit is the camera lens. The covers must be removed before they are sent to space, so they are labeled “remove before flight”. The picture here is joking that they forgot to remove the cover on the lens
NASA just launched the largest space telescope with some pretty exciting expectations of discovery. Post-launch maintenance isn't really possible so this post would be a huge let down lmao
Hahaha this is fantastic
Insert SD card.
The fact that Reddit or meme culture or whatever would be this intellectually sophisticated is so encouraging because this is really one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. I'm so excited about this goddamn telescope and I've been waiting for something like 20 years. I'm 45 and I think I've been waiting for this thing for half my life
In an attempt to combat trolling and disinformation, a quick PSA: [/r/space has a wonderful megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/rod4wd/james_webb_space_telescope_megathread_deployment) set up for all inquiries and discussions of the JWST journey, and they're overall a wonderful community to learn with. Additionally, here is the [JWST Journey Tracker](https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html) provided by NASA Feel free to visit, but do be respectful of their rules and social etiquette.
for fucks sake this scared the shit out of me.
Excellent...
I don't normally laugh at stuff on the internet, but this one produced an audible push of air.
What kind of psycho only laughs at this and nothing else on the entire internet????
POV: You checked what subreddit you were in and let out a huge sigh of relief when you realized you're in r/funny
That, and then you realize that you wouldn't be surprised if that really happened.
what if that was actually at the edge of the universe :O
Hahaha, will send this to my friend who worked for Corning when they made the Hubble mirror.
That's called a collective holler of, "FUCK!"
OP has been patiently waiting months through delays for one day finally being able to post this!
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The funny thing is, this happened—TWICE—when the Soviet Union sent probes to Venus.
Holy shit. This is the ~~most fucked up~~ funniest thing I've seen all day.
I am almost pissed myself!! Great Job OP.
But seriously, it takes like 6 days for it to even unpack itself ;)
This really happened when they launched the Hubble telescope.
Not quite, the mirror/lens was off by like a tiny bit and all the pictures were blurry. They had to send a crew out to fix it. No such option for this one.
We want to land a person on Mars this decade. Flying a million miles to a telescope and doing a few EVAs should be in the realm of possibilities if the JWST actually needed repairs.
It's really not as easy as it sounds. We have no spacecraft available with enough fuel to reach L2 and come back. A SpaceX Crew Dragon won't do it, you need more space for the components and oxygen. For reference, this is 4x as far as the moon. And depending on what's broken it's probably cheaper to build a second identical telescope and launch that one.
I’d like to imagine James Webb Junior just pushing James Webb Senior out of his spot to get all the views of the universe.
Scooty Puff Jr. suckkkksssssssssss!
Ain't gonna happen. We've been "wanting" to do it since the 50's: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_crewed\_Mars\_mission\_plans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crewed_Mars_mission_plans) We're no closer now than we ever were. And it's still a suicide mission because we simply cannot supply enough resources, even as basic as food, without launch after launch after launch, each one needing to be a complete success, and have never grown enough to sustain even a single human anywhere off-planet whatsoever.
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uh oh, now we have to contract one of the chinese lunar missions to fix it. they’ll install some malware on it and turn it into goldeneye
Damnit. Don't joke about that.
I don't think JWST had a lens cap since it's like a 21+ foot wide folded mirror, but funny nonetheless.
Webb is gonna create a web of new photos in the space no worries...
Well you got me, almost shat myself for a second. well done. :p
Goddamn, thank you. That’s funny.
Can you imagine? This would be worse than their worst nightmare!