Amazing technology with a big capital budget & long program timeframe, its the amazing James Web Space Telescope by NASA
Watch the Launch Live Online 7:20am December 24th 2021 :)
What an exciting time to be an aerospace enthusiast, with the 25 year long enormously expensive NASA next generation space telescope to look at dim infrared light equal in intensity to a 4w incandescent night light placed on the moons surface & looked at from Earth's surface!
We are talking about faint IR or infrared light in the single digital nanojansky power level, like 1 photon per second, tiny amounts of low energy photons at very low flow rates, to peer into the earliest or oldest light that formed during the formation of our universe, some 13 billion years ago.
Lets explore the James Web space telescope, a $10 billion USD look into the formation of the universe through a 6 meter segmented hexagonal gold plated beryllium mirror system that robotically self assembles, with each segment articulated with motors & struts so that the curvature of each mirror can be dynamically tuned & moved to focus all the primary mirrors onto the single secondary mirror, where the light then bounded into the closed loop helium acoustical dual piston cryocooler chilled IR sensor suite, part of which operates at just 7 kelvin for the upmost low energy photon sensitivity (think amazing night vision technology)
A system of 6 electric reaction wheels *think gyroscopic control* & over 20 rocket engines that are fueled by hydrazine pressure fed over a catalysis for lower energy thrust pulses for station keeping & 4 more powerful rocket engines that burn a hypergolic self-ignition mixture of hydrazine & dinitrogen tetroxide for higher performance bursts of thrust for major steering or control maneuvers.
Multiple offset layers of Aluminized Kapton film, as heat shields enhanced with rip stop seams, that unfolds itself using a system of cables & pulleys & more than a hundred lock pins that have to release at the same time in a mechanical symphony of precision, reliably operating otherwise the entire device becomes an expensive block of space junk made on Earth.
The idea of these thin foil film heat shields to block 200,000 watts of incoming solar radiation energy from the sun & only transfer 1w of heat to the cold side where the instruments are operating near absolute zero in the cold dark vacuum of space. The sun facing film layers we coated with a special high emissivity silicon that absorbs heat rays from the sun & emits the heat as radiative heat back into space. See energy conversion materials science, physics, chemistry, specifically thermodynamics, thermal heat transfer methods, & related thermal conductivity, insulation function, & related topics.
The cryocooler itself a modern marvel of applied technology with excellent precise manufacturing techniques in cost naive low volume aerospace exceptional flavors made in America. This cooling unite for the IR sensors worthy of a book itself. I still have much to learn.
I suggest that you watch this YouTube video : James Web Space Telescope by Real Engineering
Then you have the PV generator array making 2000 watts of electrical energy from incoming sunlight. A innovative power bus, hardened computers, long life batteries, amazing long distance high gain transceiver radios for communications to send the imagery back to Earth for people to enjoy, study, research, analyze, teach with & share online!
If you have one of those Seek Thermal IR dongles that plugs into your Smartphones charging port (for android or iPhone) - thats IR imaging, this is like that on the nation state aerospace scale & corresponding budget.
Launching Dec. 24, 2021, 7:20am EST ( 1220 GMT or 9:20 a.m. local time in French Guiana) on an Ariane 5 rocket to place JWST into Lagrange L2, a place in the shadow behind the Earth, in a solar orbit where the Earth constantly shields the JWST, some 1.5 million km from Earth or 1 million miles away!
NASA flagship observatory project & the result of millions of hours of human labor & intelligent thought, blood, sweat & tears of job; manufactured with the best methods & materials available, and tested inside an amazing cold vacuum chamber that's enormous. The JWST program an astonishing example of what America does at its best & brightest as a country, things that Billionaires should pay with personal income taxes, just like everyone else!
Industrial military aerospace contractors Northrup Grumman & Ball Aerospace & Technologies were contracted by NASA to build the JWST parts, components, sub-assemblies, power buss, logic & radiation hardened compute elements, strong well bonded snake soldered wires with low resistance or excellent electrical conductivity & durable strong connectors, highly specialized insulation with no seems or gaps or hermetically sealed to prevent thermal intrusion, gas movement or other way for heat to move, leak, conduct or radiate; thermal pipes & vapor chamber heat pipes & brushless super long life fans & low friction optimized pumps & precision machining ground heat sinks & machined exotic materials in the brackets, mounting hardware, fasteners & other mechanics.
Consider the chemical vapor deposition of 48 grams of 24k gold onto the front surfaces of the polished ultra-stiff beryllium hexagonal mirror frames. That much gold about the size of a gold ball. Gold was chosen as the premier IR reflector, the same reason that McLaren F1 engine bay was lined with gold foil, to reflect the immense radiated IR heat load emitted by the BMW V12 engine mounted inside the carbon fiber tub. This type of prepreg carbon fiber, epoxy bonded, baked in a pressure heated autoclave, damaged prolonged thermal loading by temperatures above 300 C (think near the exhaust header where the Inconel nickel alloy header pipes are glowing red hot like a searing hot radiator.) So, the shiny shinny gold foil protects the carbon fiber from heat damage & significantly, can be very compact & applied directly to the carbon fiber. A less expensive heat shield method with similar performance can be made with polished aluminum reflectors with offsets from the carbon fiber, but that would have eaten up space in the engine bay & would look less premium. McLaren was trying to use the best of every material to make the F1 as superlative as possible as it was, in a way, the definitive start of the supercar era of automotive ultra-premium performance.
Firstly, working with beryllium difficult, like titanium, but worse & because beryllium dust formed during machining toxic to human lung cells. The type of beryllium used to make the mirror bases brittle & stiff more like ceramics & less ductile or elastic than steel, but far lighter in terms of mass, similar to aluminum lithium alloys used in rocket bodyshells by SpaceX in their Falcon 9 series, but has a linear coefficient of thermal expansion over a broad range of temperatures from cryogenic near absolute zero to as high as 800 C, making beryllium the best metal for space telescope optics, sometimes beryllium copper alloys are utilized to get better thermal conductivity or better electrical performance. Understanding why Beryllium toxic requires understanding the interactions of metals with the human body.
Usually toxic metals have electron configuration energies that allow them to replace sulfate, where the metals can be reduced to different oxidation states & enter cell DNA, where the heavy metals caused carcinogenic, mutagenic breakages of the DNA or damages the transcription enzyme machinery, since DNA transcription enzymes are really a novel kind of self-assembling automatic chemical assembly machine that rides the DNA & uses the ACTG information from the strands to build proteins that are required to repair or make new cells, to heal, to build cell organs & functional structures & membranes in & around cells, special proteins used in chemical messaging or cytokine signaling so organic have a communication & networking structure to work with the other organs & systems of the human body. Each cell is a system & organs are made of systems of cells.
Miraculously, the human body self assembles using DNA instruction from novel enzymes that enable warm flesh to operate at temperature just above STP or around 98 deg F, since enzymes enable the human body to perform wet aqueous reactions with less heat energy to activate the reactors to overcome the aE or reaction energy threshold limit to kick a rection forward. I know this because I have a background educated in chemistry & environmental science, ecology, toxicology & spend a lot of time online research medical subjects about how nutrient work in the body, especially micro-nutrients & trace elemental nutrients like selenium & cobalt & iron.
Actually, the chemical structure of the human body made with 126 different elements, most of which were formed in stellar synthesis in Stars in space much larger than our little yellow GV2 Sun in our part of the Milky way in our little neighbor solar system. Metal toxicity often related to the redox ion state of a given metal element. Some elements have up to 7 different redox states & different ionization levels makes them either functionally helpful, neutral or non-toxic or toxic to the human body.
Hexavalent chromium for example highly toxic, where it other ionic forms are actually useful to help facilitate cell energy utilization of glucose in the citric acid cycle so that ADP can be converted to ATP & so as to help hydrogen H+ ions migrate across outer cell membrane to create electrical energy potential difference, to control ion pores for sodium & calcium & ultimate to help our body oxidize carbon such that we breath in nitrogen laced with oxygen & breath out nitrogen laced with CO2. Physiology & medicine are amazingly deep topics & I have only scratched the surface with biochemistry in order to understand how viruses harm the body, why some substances are toxic & others are not, how nutrition actually works on the cell levels to help the body make energy, how humans are omnivorous & able to eat so many different things. Essentially a human body made of about 100 trillion warm wet cells that each operate a bit like a hydrogen fuel cell for energy production to power cell processes that enable life to work.
Yes, curiosity drove my online Wikipedia & YouTube research, to gain insight & understanding, especially of how I became Type 2 diabetic & how metformin works to help with food carbohydrate metabolism without spiking blood glucose, despite being excreted in the urine nearly unchanged after making its way through the digestive system & kidneys. Sorry about the poor grammar in my postings too. I struggled with English as a student & look at communication in a more functional & less elegant way. As long as you can make sense of what I am writing, that's all that counts. If I poured time into making each posting on this blog with perfect spelling & grammar, someone else more profession in writing & language would need to edit each post, that would slow me down, I would publish less & share less cool information with other people, defeating the point of the blog. Besides, most of Earth's people read & write & speak Engrish, a lose form of English since they learn it in ESL programs as a second language, so their writing & posting often contains even more spelling & grammar errors, including in scientific journals, of which I have read many, white papers from company scientists, of which I have read many, the Engrish can be kind of choppy, but still intelligible. Get the idea!
The James Web Space Telescope heavy, with a launch mass of 6,500 kg (14,300 lbs). Designers of the JWST at NASA would have liked a mirror bigger than 6 meters, but to fit it in the nosecone fairing of the Ariane 5 rocket required a compact folded design. That means the JWST also a robot & performs final assembly automatically in space with no humans there to work on it. Given the distance from Earth, more than 1,000,000 miles, refueling the rocket motor tanks of the JWST will require a robotic refueling spacecraft & NASA left some cookies "engineering flare, easter eggs in software" that indicate they worked out exactly how to refuel the JWST while its sitting in its small stationary orbit at L2, using a robotic refueling spacecraft, launched on a rocket similar to the Ariane 5. The segmented primary mirror, once unfolded to its final configuration, consists of 18 hexagonal units that combined produce a 6.5 m (21 ft) mirror, that reflects a range of different frequencies from long-wavelength light to miner infrared (0.6 to 28.8 μm)
JWST position at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, 0.010 au away from Earth. The imaging instruments all kept behind the giant multi-layer aluminized Kapton heat shield at below 50 K (−223 °C; −370 °F). Lower temperatures produce less atomic scale vibration in atoms & molecules. Look up the Bose Einstein condensate laser trap to see what light does near absolute zero with laser cooling in a vacuum ^^ Cooling the IR instruments to very low temperatures gives them better sensitive to very low energy photons in the IR spectrum from vastly distant parts of the universe, the oldest light from first lighted emitted after the big bang that kicked off existence in our dimension as we know it from scientific study & research & writings & analysis & classifications that supersede silly stories from antiquity about the origins of existence. I personally believe that God, the highest dimensional level entity, most powerful, most intelligent, most excellent in all ways, who breathed out the big bang into existence. I suspect that God also created Angles & Demons & other intelligent Alien species on other planets in other solar systems & in other dimensional levels above & below the 4th dimensional macro-molecular reality we find ourselves alive in today.
Astronomy the science for example replaced or superseded the speculative pseudo-science of Astrology, which is more fantasy than empirical evidence resembling anything similar to how Astronomy Science created with optical telescopes & intellectuals in the renaissance writing of their heliocentric Copernicus inspired observations to communicate their findings to others, who repeated their observations. Thats why NASA builds space telescopes, so they our outside Earth's noisy filtering variable atmosphere that distorts space imagine, especially because of pollutants & space trash & things from space that burn up in Earth atmosphere, & certain halogenated hydrocarbons like CFC's that damage the UV filtering gas layers in the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere & out the boundry between Earth & Space, that Earth floats & travels in, pulled by a gravitation field into a heliocentric orbit around or local solar system star, the Sun, which is 10,000x larger than the Earth, fusing 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second.
Actually, when we build a Dyson sphere around the Sun, it will produce trillions of trillions of trillions of watts of electrical energy to beam back to Earth or to the Moon colony or to other spacecraft with electric ion drive or just electron beam drive *no fuel* using high velocity electrons emitted to produce very low thrust at near the speed of light with engine life in the years or decades, very high iSP or specific impulse. Combustion rockets cannot carry enough cryogenic hydrogen & oxygen to have higher than about 800 seconds of iSP assuming even better heat resistant materials & techniques realized in future rocket generations from Blue Origin significantly.
Much of the launch energy just required to overcome Earth's gravity. Electric spin launch of satellite offers a cheaper cleaner way to send bulk mass into space. Ballon assisted launching can reduce fuel requirements, increasing payload capacity of smaller less expensive rockets that can put stuff higher into space, orbits around the Earth, Moon or Sun, or to send people to Mars. Launching from the Moon uses 6x less fuel & launching from space can used 50x less fuel.
Orbital launching, gravitational slingshot Ing from other celestial bodies like planets, our deepest space probes are billions of miles from Earth now, they made use of these clever propulsion techniques to access deep space. Their simple electronics & low power consumption means those probes are still sending information to Earth today!
With fewer failure points in a system, greater longevity & reliability & endurance or real-world operating lifetime extended. In the automotive space, for decades, Toyota has deliberately tried to reduce flaw or glitch or error levels in the products for this reason, to make them enduringly reliable for 30+ years of daily driving with basic maintenance. The 4.0L V8 engine in the Lexus LS 400, highly optimized by Yamaha, one of the most reliable & longest lasting gasoline engines every made - think 30,000 hours of operating life, with hundreds of thousands of hot cold cycles in the real world, harsh daily driving for decades without major failure. Automotive tuners similarly love the 2JZ inline 6 made by Toyota, one of the strongest engines every made, able to reliable operated with tremendous boost levels from super or turbo charging the intake.
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