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When you're building an observatory like the James Webb
Space Telescope, you want to make sure all the pieces fit
together correctly.
To see how engineers go about doing that,
we're here at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California.
We have two important pieces of our development hardware
that we're putting together-- mating-- today.
We have our OTE mockup--
Which is?
It's a representation of the optical telescope element.
That's the part that has the big mirror and the cameras
inside of it.
And we're putting it together with the integrated validation
article.
That's really just the sun shield membranes
attached to the space vehicle and the spacecraft part of it.
How difficult is this process?
I mean, you have crew of what, nine people here?
That's right.
We have nine highly trained, highly skilled personnel here.
The OTE mockup weighs about 5,600 pounds,
and we need to lift it very carefully
so that we don't end up lifting it off level
or having it swing uncontrollably.
And we've got a couple of key pieces of equipment that are
in the load train-- that's between the hook of the crane
and the actual thing that we want to lift--
that are important to give us the information
we need to do that lift safely.
There's one thing called a load cell.
That's actually kind of like a fish scale or a luggage scale,
and that tells us how much we're pulling on the OTE mockup,
and when we've actually lifted the entire weight.
The second thing that's attached in the load train above that,
it's that big black box that you can see up there.
That's called a Hydra Set, and it's a little hydraulic ram
that we can pump up and down and do extremely precise raising
and lowering of very, very heavy hardware.
Now this isn't exactly just like putting a couple of LEGO pieces
together.
Your precision, you mentioned-- how precise do you have to be?
Right, well, the interfaces that we're putting together
are accurate to a few thousandths of an inch.
We've got a little more leeway here
with this development hardware, but still, the overall process
is the same, and the care that we take to put them
together is exactly the same.
So where are we now?
Well, we're right next to the spacecraft bus, called a "bus"
because it carries the telescope and everything else.
So it's a spacecraft bus.
This is our mockup representation of the bus,
and we have in it one of our telescopic mid-booms
that's built by Astro Aerospace.
And this is not flight-like, but it does telescope out
to the full flight width.
So basically, the sun shield will
be attached to this mid-boom and be stretched out.
Yeah, that's right.
There's actually a spreader bar that goes on the end.
That's a big kind of pull-like thing.
You can see them on the fore and aft sides.
They're the big gray bars.
There will be one out here, and it
will be attached to some cables that
are attached to our membranes, and as the mid-boom pushes out,
it'll pull the membranes out and unfold it.
Well, let's see.
Let's get going.
So we have this just on big tracks
for ease of use on the ground.
We don't need to actually have it deploy
in a flight-like manner.
We're just trying to get the motion, correct so that we
can check out our membrane.
Now the flight deployment doesn't go nearly this fast.
Yeah, I didn't think so.
Well, thank you so much for allowing
us to visit with you guys while you put these two major pieces
of the observatory together.
Right.
Well, it's an important event for us,
and a big risk burn down event, and we're just
happy to have you out to record it for everybody.
The next step is for the sides of the sun shield
to be folded up all around this telescope mockup
that I'm in to make sure that everything's
in place during launch.
Thanks for joining us for this edition of Behind the Webb.