Testing Completed on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Backplane

Dear readers and followers,

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has reached another development milestone with the completion of static load testing of its primary mirror backplane support structure (PMBSS) moving the telescope one step closer to its 2018 launch.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's next-generation space observatory and successor to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Designed to be the most powerful space telescope ever built, Webb will observe the most distant objects in the universe, provide images of the first galaxies formed and see unexplored planets around distant stars. The Webb telescope is a joint project of +NASA , the +European Space Agency, ESA  and the +Canadian Space Agency . 

Credit image: NASA 

The PMBSS is the stable platform that holds the telescope's science instruments and the 18 beryllium mirror-segments that form the 21-foot-diameter primary mirror nearly motionless while the telescope peers into deep space. The primary mirror is the largest mirror in the telescope -- the one starlight will hit first.

Lee Feinberg, NASA’s Optical Telescope Element manager at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, announced "Static testing demonstrates the backplane has the structural integrity to withstand the forces and vibrations of launch and is the final test prior to starting the integration of the backplane with the rest of the telescope,"

The Northrop Grumman Corporation and ATK of Magna, Utah, completed the testing before delivering the structure to Northrop Grumman's facilities in Redondo Beach, California.

The next step for the space telescope is to integrate the composite structures with the deployment mechanisms to create the overall Optical Telescope Element (OTE) structure. The OTE structure will then be shipped to Goddard for integration with the mirrors. NASA and Northrop Grumman will perform cryogenic testing of the PMBSS structure after mirror integration is complete.

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A 'second light' mission for the Kepler space telescope

Dear followers,

Few months ago, in May, the research working on the search of exo-planets received a very bad news from the US space telescope Kepler.  Actually, the +Kepler Space Telescope  was down due to a malfunction of a mechanism which allows the telescope to focus on a given point in the sky towards.

However, now, Engineers from the Kepler mission and Ball Aerospace have developed a way of keeping the stability of the spacecraft. The solution is based on the pressure provide by the Sun on the surface of spacecraft. 

based on this solution the second life of Kepler will be start. The US space telescope which has increased the discovery of new planets since 2009 is the first telescope dedicated to the search for planets sisters of the Earth in other solar systems in our galaxy, the Milky Way. So far it has detected 2,740 potential exo-planets which 122 were confirmed to the day using telescopes and other equipment.

Credit: wikipedia

In last April, astronauts had announced the discovery by Kepler, two exoplanets with the greatest similarity to Earth ever recorded and where water could remain liquid and potentially allow life to exist.