Genesis Of The James Webb Space Telescope Architecture: The Designers’ Story
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, is an infrared observatory of novel design: deployable, with active optics, fully open to space for radiative cooling and orbiting the Lagrange point no. 2.
This article explains the rationale leading to this specific design and describes the various other architectures that were considered along the way: from a monolithic 10-meter telescope in geosynchronous orbit to a 6-meter one in High Earth Orbit, then a 16-meter observatory on the Moon, a 4- or 6-meter one in an elliptical heliocentric orbit, and a segmented 8-meter one passively cooled to 50 K at L2, which was finally descoped to 6.6 meters.
It also addresses the optimization for scientific performance, the challenge of dealing with such an ultra-low operating temperature, cost issues, supporting technology, modifications made during final design and, finally, how the architecture performs on orbit.
Pierre Y. Bely, Garth D. Illingworth, Jonathan W. Arenberg, Charles Atkinson, Richard Burg, Mark Clampin, Lee D. Feinberg, Paul H. Geithner, John C. Mather, Michael T. Menzel, Max Nein, Larry Petro, David C. Redding, Bernard D. Seery, H. Philip Stahl, Massimo Stiavelli, Hervey Stockman, Scott P. Willoughby
Comments: 36 pages, 37 figures, submitted to Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments and Systems (JATIS)
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Space Physics (physics.space-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:2501.09072 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2501.09072v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.09072
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Submission history
From: Garth Illingworth
[v1] Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:00:04 UTC (3,001 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09072
Astrobiology
