The flagship mission will be the most ambitious astronomical observatory ever launched, building on a quarter-century of discoveries made by NASA’s famous Hubble Space Telescope. “That is taking longer to complete, and there are also a few mistakes that happened.” “More time is needed to test and integrate the highly complex sunshield and spacecraft section at Northrop Grumman,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate. The telescope and instruments have passed their standalone tests, but the team in charge of building the spacecraft has run into problems, NASA officials said. A NASA review board determined earlier this month that the mission would likely not be ready to launch until 2020. Officials on Tuesday said that was no longer possible.Īll components of the observatory are in a clean room at Northrop Grumman’s satellite factory in Redondo Beach, California, where technicians will connect JWST’s spacecraft platform - still under construction - to the mission’s telescope and science module, which arrived at the contractor’s plant earlier this year following assembly at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and a cryogenic vacuum test at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA announced last September that JWST would miss its target launch date in October 2018, but managers still expected the observatory to be ready for liftoff between March and June of 2019. “Frankly, the tasks are taking longer to complete than we expected, which will result in a new target launch window, which we now expect to be approximately May of 2020.” “We need to successfully integrate both halves of the observatory into the final flight configuration and complete some vital testing after an independent assessment of the remaining tasks,” Lightfoot said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. ![]() “However, work performance challenges that were brought to light have prompted us to take some action. “The project has achieved numerous successful milestones, and in fact, 100 percent of the observatory’s flight hardware is now complete,” said Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator. Problems encountered in recent months with the observatory’s spacecraft bus, the section that will host the mission’s expandable telescope after liftoff, prompted a review of the schedule engineers need to prepare it for liftoff. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunnīlaming a slew of technical snags and “avoidable errors,” NASA officials said Tuesday that the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, already years behind schedule, will be delayed to 2020, potentially pushing the mission’s development cost above an $8 billion cap mandated by Congress. ![]() The James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror and instrument section, known as the Optical Telescope element and Integrated Science (OTIS) module, is unpacked from its shipping container after arriving at Northrop Grumman’s satellite factory in Redondo Beach, California, earlier this year.
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