The new James Webb Telescope begins full operation by this July. 4 New Hampshire companies are part of the historic event.

Background

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful deep space telescope made by humans. The twenty-year project in the making is an international collaboration among NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It is named after James E. Webb, administrator at NASA from 1961 to 1968.?

The telescope rocketed into space from the European Spaceport located in tropical French Guiana on early Christmas morning 2021.?On January 24, 2022, it arrived at its destination.

Location in space

The new telescope is orbiting about 1 million miles on the far side of the Earth. It is positioned in one of the five locations that maintain a reasonable balance between the earth and sun’s gravity. Webb is parked at “L2”, the best place for a telescope.?“L” stands for the name of a self-taught European mathematician, Lagrange, who figured out this gravity equilibrium question in the 1700’s. ?As Earth moves around the Sun, Webb follows the earth in unison. Even with this gravitational partnership, the telescope must fire its thrusters for two to three minutes every 20 days.?The thrusters will run out of fuel in about 20 years.?All things come to an end, even in outer space.

Keeping things very cold

For the infrared lenses to work, they are located on the cold side of the telescope with temperatures maintained between 390 to 449 degrees below Fahrenheit. To keep the lenses this cold, Webb has a tennis-court sized sunshield on the hot side made of five thin layers, each layer the width of a human hair.?The layers are covered with reflective aluminum and high-performance plastics called “Kapton E”, developed by DuPont in the 1960’s.?The two outer layers are also covered with specially treated silicon that is electrically conductive to avoid static electricity build up on the shield surfaces. A static spark could vaporize electronics.

Final Start Up Phase

The telescope is in its final 17 mode test phase which includes seeing how it functions when tracking things close and far, in hot and cold temperatures, and moving or stationary objects.?By early July, NASA will announce if Webb is ready to begin full operations.

U.S. Companies

NASA’s map below shows the geographic locations of companies that worked on the project in the United States.?The names on the map are too small to read but there are 142 of them.?Europe has 104 and Canada 12 companies.?

New Hampshire Companies

New Hampshire has four high-tech companies that contributed to this historic project.?

·???????Appli-Tec, Salem, N.H. In 2006 I helped Tim Walsh, CEO, relocate his company from an old mill building on Essex Street in Haverhill, MA to a new 20,000 sf industrial condo he purchased in Salem, New Hampshire. ?Tim’s company provided a urethane adhesive that protects camera lenses and circuit boards?exposed to the volatile temperatures in space. NASA also likes the adhesive because as it heats up in the unfiltered radiation of the Sun, it dissipates heat while not releasing any vapors which can fog up things like a camera lens and circuit boards.?This would be an expensive and unfixable problem for a 10.8+ billion-dollar telescope.

·???????Timkin Company, Keene, N.H. Timkin made the ball bearings in latch mechanisms that secured deployment booms.?These booms are Northrop Grumman’s 6 telescoping graphite-epoxy composite tubes that unfolded the 47-foot-wide sunshield.?Timkin also made bearings that helped extend the downlink antenna. No extended antenna, no communication.

·???????Corning Specialty Materials, Keene, N.H. Corning’s Keene facility made a sensor that is part of a “Fine Guidance System” assembled in Canada. To eliminate blurry photographs, the guidance system sends signals to other parts of the telescope to compensate for any movement or vibration in space.?

·???????Optical Solutions Inc. (OSI), Charlestown, N.H.?This N.H. company made Zinc Selenide lenses for the telescope.?These are transparent yellowish lenses that make color corrections in the telescope’s camera looking at close objects in our solar system. If we see Martians and they are green, the camera will show the true green.

The above map shows geographic locations of the 4 New Hampshire companies.?Note that the Keene region has a strong optics industry cluster.?Salem, close to Boston, has a high concentration of advanced manufacturing, office, and retail companies.

So what

We tend to forget that relative to the Universe, we are smaller than a speck of dust in a much larger ancient story. With the help of four small NH companies, in a few weeks we will begin to see more of this story.