The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Progress was good but the complexities of the I&T activities led to a further delay into 2021, compounded by the global coronavirus pandemic. In 2020 March, COVID-19 forced nationwide closures and NASA telework, but aerospace workers at the Northrop Grumman facility in California were permitted to work under enhanced COVID-19 safety procedures. After the final vibration and acoustic test in 2020, the flight transponders failed in early 2021 and were returned to the manufacturer for repair. Flight rehearsals began in the Mission Operations Center in 2020, using the digital twin, an observatory simulator that is still in use today for verification of command sequences. Some of the rehearsals included remote or hybrid participation due to the pandemic; this would prove valuable experience during commissioning.

The final I&T work in 2021 went extremely well, adding to confidence that the spacecraft and sunshield were becoming mature and ready for launch. On 2021 October 21, JWST arrived at the launch site in French Guiana on the MN Colibri ship, after passing through the Panama Canal. On 2021 December 25 at 12:20 UTC, the Ariane 5 launched the Webb exactly as planned, with a flawless launch and positioning of JWST for its trajectory to L2 (see figure). The launch went so well that the propellant needed to adjust its trajectory to L2 and the insertion were much less than budgeted. The propellant available for orbit adjustment will likely allow a mission life extension to a predicted 20 years, far larger than the 10-year goal.

II.5.1 2022

The first two weeks of “deployment terror” went remarkably well, with almost no unexpected issues. In particular, the sunshield with its 140 release mechanisms deployed successfully. The years of careful testing and checking had paid off. The following two weeks of mirror deployments also went smoothly and JWST was inserted into its L2 orbit 29 days after launch, ready for the slow, crucial process of aligning the mirrors. The outcome was that the optical performance and stability exceeded the requirements, with 1.1μm diffraction-limited imaging at NIRCam, almost twice as good as the requirement (2μm) [86, this issue].

Despite the spike in COVID-19 cases at the end of 2021, the careful protocols developed and rehearsed by the Mission Operations Team enabled staffing of all critical ground-support positions throughout launch and early commissioning. Precautions included an expansion of the space used by the Mission Operations Center (MOC) at STScI, to permit socially-distanced staffing; greater reliance on remote support; mandated vaccination or testing, mandated masking, and electronic contact tracing for personnel in the MOC; and rapid antigen testing every other day for on-site staff.

Overall, commissioning the observatory went extremely smoothly in the MOC, due to the prior tests and rehearsals, and especially the competence, focus and leadership throughout the NASA, Northrop, Ball, STScI, instrument teams, and other contractor teams. Everything on JWST works! Commissioning was completed and all 17 instrument modes were approved for scientific use by 2022 July 10. During commissioning, 120 hours were devoted to Early Release Observations [100, ERO]. The ERO of SMACS 0723 was announced by President Biden at the White House July 11 (Figure 4), and Stephan’s Quintet, the Carina Nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula, and WASP-96b were released on July 12. The data were released through the archives at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) on 2022 July 14; the release also included the commissioning data and online documentation of the scientific performance.