"We get about 600 degrees F (330 degrees C) between the hot side and what I call our coldest temperature on the observatory, the instrument detectors," which are running at around minus 400 degrees F (minus 235 degrees C), he added. "We get about a 100 degree Fahrenheit (55 degrees Celsius) drop per layer," Parrish said. Any heat from the telescope would dazzle those detectors and outshine that faint precious signal. With the ultimate goal to detect the extremely faint light coming from the most distant stars and galaxies, those that lit up the dark universe in the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, Webb's detectors need to be extremely sensitive. By reflecting both incoming solar radiation and heat from planet Earth, the sunshield keeps Webb perfectly cold. Since Webb observes infrared light, or heat, it has to be kept at extremely cold temperatures so that there is no heat from Webb that could obscure its observations. The James Webb Space Telescope is designed to study the universe in the infrared wavelengths and therefore has to be extremely cold for its sensitive detectors to work as designed. If anything went wrong, the entire mission, which cost $10 billion and took roughly three decades to build, could have been in jeopardy. This sunshield deployment was thoroughly tested on Earth but even the most high-tech test lab can't fully simulate the effects of weightlessness and other factors present in outer space. "We still have got a lot of work to do, but getting the sunshield deployed is really, really big." "This is a really big moment, I just want to congratulate the entire team," one of the operations managers could be heard saying in the webstream upon confirmation of the fifth layer being completed. EST (1709 GMT) and was met with cheers and applause from control teams. The final, fifth layer, was tensioned at 12:09 p.m. EST (1523 GMT) as the telescope cruised some 546,000 miles (879,000 kilometers) from Earth.
The successful deployment of the fourth layer was confirmed at 10:23 a.m. NASA originally expected each layer to take one day, but by the end of the first day, three layers were successfully tensioned with the final two tightened on Tuesday (Jan. The elaborate tightening of the sunshield's diamond-shaped layers began on Monday (Jan.
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