When it launches in 2013 the James Webb Space Telescope will settle in an orbit roughly one million miles from the Earth. That distance is currently too far for any astronaut or any other existing NASA servicing capability to reach. Therefore, NASA is doing everything necessary to design and test the telescope on the ground using techniques that will ensure that it deploys and operates reliably in space.
However, NASA is looking into just how feasible it might be to perform emergency servicing operations on the Webb telescope if such a need were to arise and if such a servicing capability were to become available sometime in the future.
"We are currently studying the possibility of adding a lightweight grapple fixture to JWST," said John Decker, Deputy Associate Director of the JWST Project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "A grapple fixture is a kind of a grab bar that would afford a means for a future manned or robotic servicing capability to safely attach to the telescope in space."
Once the engineers who are assessing the feasibility of adding the grapple feature have concluded the study, they will present the results to NASA Headquarters. At that time, there will be a determination as to whether the grapple feature will be added to the telescope. The assessment will finalize in 2008.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a 21st century space observatory that will peer back more than 13 billion years in time to understand the formation of galaxies, stars and planets and the evolution of our own solar system. It is expected to launch in 2013. The telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
Image Credit: NASA
NASA's Space Shuttle Program successfully fired a reusable solid rocket motor Thursday, May 24, at a Utah test facility. The two-minute test provided important information for continued shuttle launches and for development of the rocket that will carry the next human spacecraft to the moon.
The static firing of the full-scale, full-duration flight support motor was performed at 1 p.m. MDT at ATK Launch Systems Group, a unit of Alliant Techsystems Inc. in Promontory, Utah, where the shuttle's solid rocket motors are manufactured.
Movies and television have educated us more than we know. Thanks to detective thrillers, we understand about the drama of "wearing a wire." But a NASA-sponsored technology is paving the way for all of us to be "wearing a wireless."
Metal wiring weaves a less-than-perfect web. Copper is the most common electrical conductor, but as with most metals, it can be heavy, expensive, and breakable. In contrast, conductive fibers provide a lightweight, flexible alternative to copper wiring.
Saturn's largest and most densely packed ring is composed of tightly packed clumps of particles separated by nearly empty gaps, according to new findings from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
These clumps in Saturn's B ring are neatly organized and constantly colliding, which surprised scientists.
"The rings are different from the picture we had in our minds. We originally thought we would see a uniform cloud of particles. Instead we find that the particles are clumped together with empty spaces in between," said Larry Esposito, principal investigator for the Cassini ultraviolet imaging spectrograph at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "If you were flying under Saturn's rings in an airplane, you would see these flashes of sunlight come through the gaps, followed by dark and so forth. This is different from flying under a uniform cloud of particles."
A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water.
Members of the rover science team heard from a colleague during a recent teleconference that the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit's arm, had measured a composition of about 90 percent pure silica for this soil.