12/27/2021
This Christmas (12/25/21), the James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched in an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket. Traveling to a projected location of nearly 1 million miles away from Earth to view what no other has seen. A 25 year and 10 Billion dollar project has finally launched.
Back in 1996 the building of the James Webb Telescope Space Telescope (JWST) project began.
Fortunately in 2006, John C. Schaub, Inc. was involved in designing the chiller and pumping station system to cool the process that allowed the hexagonal beryllium plates to be coated with a microscopically thin layer of gold. This coating was completed inside of a specially designed clean room vacuum chamber. This is where the Chiller system was used; allowing the vacuum chamber to attain the very clean deep vacuum levels to allow this specialized coating to occur.
The gold was heated to its boiling point of more than 2,500F and was vaporized and injected into the chamber. The vaporized gold was deposited onto the mirror’s optical surface with only a thickness of roughly 200 times thinner than a human hair. Each gold coated plate was approximately 4 feet in diameter. The total amount of gold used for all 18 hexagonal plates was approximately that of only 5 gold men’s wedding rings. Just over 1/10 of an ounce for each of the plates. Reason for such a thin and uniform coating is to meet the performance specs of the durability, uniformity, cryogenic stresses and reflectance. Reflectance was the main reason gold was used in the over 21 foot total collective array. Golds reflectivity has a result of 99 % related to infrared ranges needed in this application; finding light from over 13 Billion years ago. This is the type of infrared light that JWST will be collecting in deep space.
It will take approximately 6 months for it to reach its destination and unfold the components of the telescope; which had to be carefully contained, protected and engineered to open.
Keep your eyes open for some amazing sights to come in Mid-2022.
