NASA nails trickiest job on James Webb Space Telescope heading towards orbit around the Sun

NASA aced the most complicated, critical job on its newly launched James Webb Space Telescope Tuesday: unrolling and stretching a sunshade the size of a tennis court. Ground controllers cheered and bumped fists once the fifth and final layer of the sun-shield was tightly secured. It took just 1 1/2 days to tighten the ultra-thin layers using motor-driven cables, half the expected time.

The 7-ton James Webb Space Telescope is so big that the sun-shield and the primary gold-plated mirror had to be folded for launch. The sun-shield is especially unwieldy — it spans 70 feet by 46 feet (21 meters by 14 meters) to keep all the infrared, heat-sensing science instruments in constant subzero shadow. The mirrors are next up for release this weekend.

The James Webb Space Telescope will not be in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope is - it will actually orbit the Sun, 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2, NASA revealed. What is special about this orbit is that it lets the telescope stay in line with the Earth as it moves around the Sun. This allows the satellite's large sunshield to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Sun and Earth (and Moon).

The $10 billion telescope is more than halfway toward its destination, following its Christmas Day send-off. It is the biggest and most powerful observatory ever launched — 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope — enabling it to peer back to almost the beginning of time.

Considered Hubble's successor, Webb will attempt to hunt down light from the universe's first stars and galaxies, created 3.7 billion years ago.

“This is a really big moment," project manager Bill Ochs told the control team in Baltimore. "We’ve still got a lot of work to do, but getting the sunshield out and deployed is really, really big.”

Engineers spent years redoing and tweaking the shade. At one point, dozens of fasteners fell off during a vibration test. That made Tuesday's success all the sweeter, since nothing like this had ever been attempted before in space.

“First time and we nailed it," engineer Alphonso Stewart told reporters.