TIM FURNISS/LONDON
Manufacturer beats Lockheed Martin to deal to build James Webb Space telescope to be launched in 2010
TRW is to build the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) after winning a NASA contract worth $824 million.
The competition for the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) was between TRW and Lockheed Martin. It is the second time in recent months the latter has lost a large contract to TRW, which in August was selected for the $4.5 billion contract to build the National Polar Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (Flight International, 3-9 September).
The NGST will be named after James Webb, who led the Apollo programme and a series of precursor unmanned lunar missions. It will be equipped with a near infrared camera, a multi-object spectrometer and a mid-infrared camera/spectrometer, with the ability to look for galaxy birth, the formation of planets in discs around young stars and study super-massive black holes in other galaxies.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be launched in 2010 aboard an expendable launch vehicle into a deep space orbit 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) from Earth, where it will be balanced between the gravity of the sun and the Earth. A single-sided sun shield on only one side of the telescope will protect it from sun light and heat, enabling the craft to be cooled to a very low temperature without the use of a complicated refrigeration unit.
In such a deep orbit, the Webb telescope will not be serviced in space like the HST, which operates in a low Earth orbit. Also unlike the HST, the new Webb telescope's 8m (26ft) diameter optical mirror will be folded at launch and its mirror-petals unfurled in space. The large mirror will provide the increased light-collecting power for the sensitive infrared instruments and represents the biggest technological challenge of the project. A large fixed-shape mirror would pose launch vehicle problems.
Source: Flight International
