4834

At least I am not the only person working Christmas day. :P

4835

And it’s off. Now comes the even harder parts.

4836

Fly you magnificent bastard. Fly.

4837

SPACE!

4838

Perfect launch. Lets hope deployment goes as smoothly.

4839

Webb separation is done! So cool that they do it with springs.

4840

4841

Yeah I saw that and was worried. I thought it wasn’t supposed to start opening that early?

4842

Yeah, I believe they wanted it to deploy immediately so it could start generating electricity to fire up heaters and get rid of any moisture that happened to hitch a ride during liftoff. Pretty sure they were worried about ice forming and jamming up some of the delicate deployment equipment.

Here’s a video giving a rundown of the deployment process. Looks like it’ll take 15 days to get the mirrors deployed, and about a month before it gets to the L2 point:

4843

The scaling on that diagram of the Hubble’s orbit and the moon is driving me batty. That’s so misleading.

Also, the mirrors will mostly deploy into place over the next 15 days, but the final centimeter is the most delicate. That will take a month alone.

4844

How did deployment of the high gain antenna go? Fine I take it?

4845

You can follow Webb’s deployment status here:

4846

The Gimbaled Antenna Assembly isn’t scheduled to be deployed until tomorrow. NASA has a nifty step-by-step deployment page:

4847

That website is so cool, thanks for posting!

[It weirdly feels like an incremental game.]

4848

It’s fascinating how they have to account for vacuum welding with so many moving parts.

In a hard vacuum, metal will actually become fused together. It’s something that was discovered in the first space walks and the astronauts had extreme difficulty closing the hatch.

4849

Launch went extremely well.

4850

It’s almost like it is rocket science, and the engineers did their calculations well :)

4851

That’s definitely close enough that Kerbal would give you credit for putting a satellite in a precise orbit, and you’d complete your contract. Nice to know all those high paid NASA scientist and engineers are almost as good as Kerbal engineers :-).

4852

The 3-body thing really screws with my KSP intuition. The rocket will be orbiting the sun, not the Earth, but its geocentric trajectory has eccentricity < 1, but once it reaches apogee it will just, like, hover there. I wonder how they got an inclination of 4°. Kourou’s latitude is 5.1°N.

It looks right to me. Hubble’s orbit is the one right next to the earth; it looks like an outline of the Earth. The one slightly further out is geosynchronous altitude.

4853

So far so good: