14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with the American space agency announce that one of the most important components of the future NASA flagship observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, has just completed a critically-important round of cryogenic tests.
Now that the assessments are concluded, the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) is ready to receive its mission payload: four state-of-the-art scientific instruments and a guidance camera.
The cryogenic tests were conducted in the world's largest clean room, at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Center is responsible for constructing the ISIM.
When James Webb launches, no early than 2018, this module will hold the Near InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), the Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec), the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), in addition to the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) camera.
JWST will be the most complex spacecraft every built and will be able to see lights produced when the Universe was just a few hundred million years old. It will replace Hubble as NASA's flagship telescope.