NGC-Built Sunshield on NASA's JWST Meets Fabrication and Test
Mileston Newsletter Subscription  Saturday, Dec 14, 2013  NGC-
Built Sunshield on NASA's JWST Meets Fabrication and Test
Milestones    • Makes Significant Progress  The preflight test
layers of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope sunshield are
meeting expected performance targets during tests by engineers
at Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC). The company is under
contract to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Md., for the design and development of Webb's sunshield,
telescope and spacecraft.  One of the most important test
milestones was successfully met for template layer five of the
tennis-court-sized sunshield that keeps the telescope cold so it
can image faint infrared light. Using a laser tracking
instrument and a laser radar unit, engineers carefully measured
the 3-D shape of the tensioned test layer in two different
orientations: face up and rotated 180 degrees so it was face
down. They then compared the measurements to an an