NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Optical Telescope
Element Pathfinder testing hardware, and a full-scale model of Parker Solar
Probe are now on display inside the Smithsonian's National Air and Space
Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.
Credit: Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
A testing replica of the “backbone” of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope
and a full-scale model of the agency’s Parker Solar Probe are now on permanent
display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Steven F.
Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.
“From touching the Sun with Parker Solar Probe to creating humanity’s most powerful window into the cosmos with the James Webb Space Telescope, these missions show what humanity can achieve as we continue to push the boundaries of human knowledge through visionary science,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “It’s not just the iconic hardware from these NASA missions on display — it’s the courage, skill, and ingenuity of the scientists, engineers, and teams who dared to turn the nearly impossible into reality.”
Joining other historic NASA missions like Apollo,
Voyager, and the Discovery Space Shuttle, Webb’s Optical Telescope Element
Pathfinder has made its way to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Smithsonian museum for
permanent display. The Pathfinder is the largest intact mirror support
structure of its kind, comprised of exotic lightweight materials invented for
the purpose of seeing near to the very limits of the observable universe. This
unique piece of hardware served a critical role in ensuring mission success by
enabling engineers to build a comprehensive testing program to validate and
ensure the most complicated optical system ever built would work flawlessly
after launch.
Credits: Producer/Writer: Thaddeus Cesari; Editor: Paul Morris; Images:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Music Credit: “History in Motion” by Fred Dubois [SACEM], Koka Media [SACEM],
Universal Publishing Production Music France [SACEM], and Universal Production
Music.
Webb’s Optical Telescope Element Pathfinder is the largest intact mirror support structure of its kind, standing over 21 feet tall, with a secondary mirror that when fully deployed reaches more than 26 feet. This pathfinder was constructed as a high-fidelity telescope nearly identical to Webb, the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built. Webb’s science goals required an exceptionally precise mirror, too large to fit fully deployed in any available rocket. The mission’s enormous size, complexity, and extreme temperature requirements demanded a comprehensive rethinking of how to test a spacecraft for the rigors of spaceflight. The pathfinder served a key role in surmounting these challenges.
NASA's James Webb Telescope Optical Telescope Element
pathfinder backdropped by the Discovery Space Shuttle inside the Smithsonian's
National Air and Space Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly,
Virginia.
Credit: Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
“NASA is proud to see the James Webb Space Telescope Optical Telescope
Element Pathfinder on display at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center,” said
Mike Davis, NASA’s project manager for the Webb telescope at the agency’s
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This remarkable test
structure helped engineers prepare the largest space telescope ever built.
Standing before it, visitors can glimpse not only the immense scale of Webb,
but also the human curiosity and ingenuity that drive us to reach beyond our
world and explore the universe.”
Joining the Webb pathfinder on
display is a replica of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. Built and operated at the
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, Parker is
more than seven years into its daring mission, with numerous successful
encounters bringing the spacecraft just 3.8 million miles from the solar
surface at a blazing 430,000 mph — faster and closer than any spacecraft in
history. Despite brutal temperatures and radiation conditions, Parker Solar
Probe has completed 27 of these close approaches to collect unprecedented data
from the only star we can study up close. The replica allows visitors insight
into the innovative technology behind the spacecraft’s ability to survive and
successfully sample the Sun’s super-heated outer atmosphere.
Also built at APL, the Parker replica stands 10 feet high, 21.5 feet long, and 8.5 feet wide and includes several of the mission’s spare parts. Several of the components are exact duplicates of the hardware now in space, built to be swapped if flight hardware failed in prelaunch testing. These components include the heat shield that protects the probe from temperatures nearing 2,000 Fahrenheit and a camera called WISPR (the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe) that views and records the Sun’s activity just off the surface. The model also includes a copy of the solar array cooling system that circulates water through solar panels to survive the Sun in close approaches.
A full-scale model of Parker Solar Probe now hangs
from the ceiling at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, Steven F.
Udvar-Hazy Center.
Credit: Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum
“Parker Solar Probe has been vital for giving us an up-close look at one of
the most extreme environments in our solar system, showing us where space
weather is born,” said Adam Szabo, Parker Solar Probe mission scientist at NASA
Goddard. “This information is key to understanding the Sun’s upper atmosphere
and how it affects us.”
The James Webb Space Telescope is
the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our
solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing
the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb
is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space
Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Parker Solar Probe was developed as
a part of NASA’s Living With a Star (LWS) program to explore aspects of the
Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The LWS program is
managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Johns Hopkins APL manages
Parker Solar Probe for NASA and designed, built, and operates the mission.
To learn more about NASA’s science
missions, visit: https://science.nasa.gov
By Thaddeus Cesari, Desiree Apodaca
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
