NASA has aced the most complicated, critical job on its newly launched space telescope: unrolling and stretching a sunshade the size of a tennis court.
Considered Hubble's successor, Webb will attempt to hunt down light from the universe's first stars and galaxies, created 13.7 billion years ago.
“This is a really big moment," project manager Bill Ochs told the control team in Baltimore."We’ve still got a lot of work to do, but getting the sunshield out and deployed is really, really big.” Engineers spent years redoing and tweaking the shade. At one point, dozens of fasteners fell off during a vibration test. That made Tuesday's success all the sweeter, since nothing like this had ever been attempted before in space.This story was first published on Jan. 4. It was updated on Jan. 5 to correct date of first stars and galaxies to 13.7 billion years ago, not 3.7 billion.
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