Five layers of a material called Kapton form the shield. Each layer, separated by vacuum gaps, is as thick as a human hair.
The five-layer sunshield for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, sitting in a cleanroom in California.The James Webb Space Telescope is busy unwrapping itself, making a grand entrance to its new home about 930,000 miles from Earth. JWST will observe faint distant objects in infrared light, and because heat also travels as infrared radiation, JWST needs to operate under very finicky temperature conditions., a NASA engineer. “It’ll just swamp the science you’re trying to get.
Planning JWST took decades, and its designers knew they wanted a sunshield early on in the development process, even before Cooper came aboard. To build the sunshield, the designers looked at several plastic-like materials before settling on one called Kapton. that, when Apollo 11 ascended from the lunar surface, he could see Kapton “scattering all around the area for great distances.”to keep its temperature stable as it journeyed from Earth to fly by Pluto and Charon in the solar system’s freezing outer reaches.
Moreover, each layer’s edges had to line up, and each layer had to be pulled taut and flat. The spacing needed to be even to prevent heat from getting trapped in the middle of the shield.
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