JWST deployed perfectly and I cried (again)

Christmas morning. 7:20 AM Eastern. The Ariane 5 rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana.

I watched the NASA livestream with cold coffee and a heart rate that was probably clinically elevated. The countdown reached zero. The engines lit. The rocket climbed. Slow, deliberate, carrying $10 billion and 25 years of work into the sky.

The JWST is in space.

The launch was perfect. Flawless, according to the mission team. The Ariane 5 placed JWST on its trajectory toward L2 with such precision that the telescope will need less fuel for course corrections than planned. That means more fuel left over for station-keeping, which means more years of science.

A perfect launch. On Christmas Day.

I cried. Of course I cried. I keep doing this.

The next two weeks

The launch was the easy part. I know that sounds absurd given that it involved strapping a folded telescope to an explosion and aiming it at a point 1.5 million kilometers away. But the Ariane 5 has a 98% success rate. The odds were in our favor.

Now come the 344 mechanisms.

The deployment tracker is live. I can watch the telescope’s progress in real time. Distance from Earth. Temperature. Deployment status.

The sunshield starts unfolding tomorrow. Five layers of kapton, each thinner than a hair, held in shape by cables and tensioning mechanisms. 107 release pins. If one jams, if one cable snags, if one motor stalls, the shield doesn’t deploy correctly, and without the shield, the telescope can’t cool to operating temperature, and without operating temperature, the infrared instruments don’t work.

The primary mirror unfolds next week. 18 gold hexagons, each on actuators that can adjust position to within a fraction of the width of a human hair. If a segment doesn’t deploy, we lose part of the mirror. If an actuator fails, we lose alignment capability.

Two weeks. 344 things that need to go right. No repair missions. No second chances.

The deployment tracker

I’ve bookmarked it. I have it open in a dedicated tab. I’ve checked it four times since the launch ended.

The current status: Webb is 15,000 km from Earth and accelerating. The solar panel deployed successfully (that was the first mechanism, triggered 30 minutes after separation from the rocket). Antenna deployed. Communications confirmed.

Two down. 342 to go.

I’m going to be refreshing this page for two weeks. Every hour, at least. Probably more when the sunshield unfolds.

This is going to be a long, anxious, wonderful two weeks.

Merry Christmas to the telescope. Get there safe.

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