It’s taken them a long long time, but it’s finally on its way. 1st hurdle complete, plenty more to come.
The thing that pleases me most is that finally there’s a non-Covid, non-political news story. Good stuff to all involved!
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While rather anxious about the launch, I still really enjoyed it!
Only another 29 days of terror to come!
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NASA is a shining beacon for that sort of thing in the USA, a country really in need of it (if you look past the historical reasons why certain space centres are where they are, like in Houston)
So many things to worry about or doom scroll through when it comes to the States, but I get very optimistic and gushing when I see the work of NASA and JPL and the like. “Competence porn” at its finest
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Just have to hope that the massive origami puzzle unfolds exactly how it needs to. Can’t just pop up and have a space walk to fix it, if anything goes wrong that can’t be dealt with remotely.
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Only thing you can say about that, though a good thing actually, is that unlike the actual rocket launch they have been able to practice and test that over and over and over again in all types of conditions
Still a bit anxious any time anyone mentions pulleys though!
Mission seems to be going better than expected so far
NASA have a cool website for the telescope, showing where it is, what temperatures it’s operating at etc etc
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I do like that website, but the units mildly outrage me!
Who uses miles per second?? I thought for a minute it was going really slowly for some reason
Worse now they have renamed during the course of this week from Imperial to English just to get further up my nose!
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Woo!
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Read an article earlier which said because the rocket did so well at orientating the telescope, the solar panels actually unfolded much earlier than anticipated to start producing power.
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A matter of four minutes early, but it all helps!
Not sure how much fuel that saved, as multiple articles rather skipped over that, but all unplanned good news is great while the mild terror of unfurling the sunshield remains
It is genuinely impressive how large the temperature disparity already is even with just the pallets folded out
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