James Webb is fully deployed

Re:James Webb is fully deployed by mturmon on Saturday January 08, 2022 @10:15PM (#29859614)

JW does indeed circle that Lagrange point, but it is definitely not in Earth’s shadow.

The JW orbit semi major axis (about the L2 point) is order of 500,000 km. The radius of Earth is about 6500 km. Thus, the shadow of the Earth is extremely small compared with the excursions of JW.

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Re:James Webb is fully deployed by ddalex on Saturday January 08, 2022 @11:52PM (#29860264)

The earth's shadow never reaches L2 anyhow - it's only penumbra at that distance since the angular size of the earth is smaller then the angular size of the Sun

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Re:James Webb is fully deployed by mturmon on Sunday January 09, 2022 @12:54PM (#29865655)

Good point. JW is at about 1.01 AU, and the solar radius is a bit over 100x the Earth radius, so there’s not really even a “shadow”.

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Re:James Webb is fully deployed by jacquesm on Sunday January 09, 2022 @07:35AM (#29862708)

Besides the sun being so stupendously large that the L2 point isn't in the direct shade cone anymore. At the orbit it is in full sunshine as though the Earth isn't there.

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