In a Science Channel special about the James Webb Space Telescope, Carl Starr, NASA Mission Operations Manager, talked about a few tense days when the mission seemed to fail. Necessary for the telescope to operate, the sun shield shrouds were supposed to open and trigger a switch to let NASA engineers know it was working properly. However, mission control never received this warning after the time the first sun shield cover should have been opened.
“We never saw the keys activate, so we stopped,” Starr said. “So the next thing to do was run it again, fire it up again, and it didn’t work.”
Hundreds of mechanisms had to work flawlessly for the telescope to open properly. They started looking for ideas on what might have gone wrong, Starr said.
“We said maybe it wasn’t all fired up. Maybe it was stuck a little bit and maybe it was a little crooked and maybe it was just blocked. Or maybe it got stuck in there somehow. The problem was very serious. I don’t know how to describe it but (mission control) got very quiet and people got very serious,” Starr said. says
Of course, there were also problems during the development and testing of the James Webb Space Telescope. The project had a one-month delay in late 2016 due to an unexpected result while testing the telescope’s mirrors. But fortunately, this time the problem was a false alarm.
“Thermal engineers came forward with some telemetry data and said, ‘I see these temperatures and I’m telling you, you can only get them if there are no issues. So they must have been turned on. They just didn’t trigger the switch,'” Starr said.
Everyone involved was clearly relieved and were able to continue the unprecedented mission.
Starr concluded: “The expression on everyone’s face when they told us this and was briefed was a huge relief, and we were able to resume the mission right after that.”
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