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The [James Webb Space Telescope] is releasing images soon HYYYYYYYYYYPE
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No cameras, but they have a 3D model that responds to a live feed of telemetry from JWST. Currently they're doing pre-deployment checks.
Does that give bad luck to the people who designed it, the people who are controlling it, the people who programmed it, or is it just years of bad luck for the entire planet that had the hubris to launch mirrors into space?
If it's the last one, can we use the past decade or so as "time served" and call it even?
Bad luck for humanity, and it applies retroactively, which explains pretty much everything
James Webb’s Basilisk
More social media impressions doing it this way
their robotics tech seems pretty reliable though, I think the doom and gloom about places the process could still fail is just to manage expectations in case something does go wrong.
I'm not a space engineer (or any kind of engineer), or particularly knowledgeable in such things, but I feel like accelerating it in it's final deployed form would induce a lot of stress to frame extremities.
You'd either require a very slow acceleration, or a lot more support frame to keep the thing rigidly intact while accelerating it. Or, you could accelerated it as a small compact unit and then unfold it as the entire thing is, essentially, in free fall towards the sun.
I'd imagine that having it unfolded in orbit would also give it exponentially more surface area to ding into some random bit of orbital garbage, which I think would be an even more ignominious death for the thing than any of the potential failure points that we're imagining in it's reverse techno-origami.
But, as I said, I've no knowledge to confirm any of this, just guessing based on a lifetime of too much sci-fi.
Because you'd turn those 400 points of failure into tens of thousands, spanning multiple years of manned launches and costing untold billions of dollars more?
It took 25 years to build.
Realistically, we don't have refueling depots in orbit or cheap reusable ways to get into orbit to support building up there so building it up in orbit and then getting it out to L2 with our current capacities is a lot harder/longer than launching it all in one go.
ISS was at least not leaving Earth orbit.
For the ISS, we built the modules as whole, functioning, self-contained chunks, launched them, and docked them together to make a larger station. But every module was a self-contained thing with all the circuitry, mechanical parts, etc, fully assembled and integrated on earth. No part of Webb is really able to be made modular like that, it's all one integrated craft.
Also not a rocket scientist, but yeah - it probably requires more delta-V to first get a stable orbit then shift to a trajectory to L2.
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The JWST is basically a GPU, in this analogy. It's something that has to be put together as one unit, it can't really be assembled elsewhere.
I mean, it was assembled on Earth just fine. The issue is just "why not do that in space". And ultimately it's just infrastructure - it's so much cheaper to assemble and test things on Earth. Orbital assembly only really works for things that don't have to come from Earth or are too big for a single lift (ISS) I think. If we had infrastructure on the moon and resource supply to the moon, etc. that didn't need to go up and down Earth's gravity well... then it wouldn't have been built on Earth.
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I mean
Given its instrumentation it can at the very least how hot your kinks are
*Ba-dap*
The tweet says "soon," but it's currently underway according to the webb.nasa.gov website.
so has the official twitter account blocked Nasa's sun, earth, and moon accounts.
https://twitter.com/catsmovie/following
Wait... If it's blocking Earth, how can they send commands to it?
The part that looks at things is blocked from earth.
I cannot see the joke, because I do not have twitter