Re:Greg Robinson fixed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, re...
by jmyeet on Friday July 15, 2022 @04:22PM
(#32112343)
Yes and no. It raises a bunch of questions/problems, wuch as:
1. Where doe the telescope deploy? Ideally in LEO so you have a chance fo fix things but then that complicated the launch. You have to park in orbit and restart th eengine at a later point. AFAIK JWST didn't enter a parking orbit so would've required additional fuel. That might not have been possible;
2. What if the launcher itself fails? Do you want to have the capacity to launch another rocket, have it rock with JWST and then go on? If so, that's a whole new level of complexity and a set of problesm you have to solve as well as things that can go wrong;
3. If you look at the flight plan there are a bunch of turns. How would the G-forces affect, say, the deployed heat shield?
4. JWST actually had to rotate during launch to point the instruments away from the Sun so as not to destroy them. This already added complexity. Doing this with the deployed spacecraft would probably only further complicate this.
1. Where doe the telescope deploy? Ideally in LEO so you have a chance fo fix things but then that complicated the launch. You have to park in orbit and restart th eengine at a later point. AFAIK JWST didn't enter a parking orbit so would've required additional fuel. That might not have been possible;
2. What if the launcher itself fails? Do you want to have the capacity to launch another rocket, have it rock with JWST and then go on? If so, that's a whole new level of complexity and a set of problesm you have to solve as well as things that can go wrong;
3. If you look at the flight plan there are a bunch of turns. How would the G-forces affect, say, the deployed heat shield?
4. JWST actually had to rotate during launch to point the instruments away from the Sun so as not to destroy them. This already added complexity. Doing this with the deployed spacecraft would probably only further complicate this.