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music

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Right now, we are at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, standing

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inside the space environment simulation laboratory in front of Chamber A

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Chamber A actually the largest thermal vacuum chamber in the world

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It has a 40 foot diameter door which weighs 40 tons

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The door is Hydraulically operated and it's 3 tons

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and it's perfectly balanced, it's so balanced that 2 people can push against the door

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and move it. Chamber A is currently undergoing

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upgrades so that it can house the largest satellite, the James Webb Space Telelscope

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and its testing for the space environment

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So for the last 3 years we've been rebuilding, remodeling the interior

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of the chamber so that it's acceptable for the cleanliness and the temperature that

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James Webb needs. Some of the things we've done, is we've upgraded

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our helium system, we've upgraded our liquid nitrogen system.

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As well as updating our air flow management system.

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With all these upgrades put together, we can now reach temperatures that no one has ever

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really been able to reach before.

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We're actually going to 11 Kelvin, which is 11 degrees Celsius essencially

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above Absolute Zero, so the absolute coldest we can get to.

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That's possible, not even really possible.

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What we get out of a thermal vacuum chamber test

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is that we can evaluate whether or not the spacecraft

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all its systems perform like they're supposed to perform once they're out

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in space.   All the air

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inside the chamber right now at ambient temperature weighs about as much as 12

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and a half Volkswagen Beatles, so about 25 tons

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so by tie you remove all the air and all the molecules out, all the mass inside the chamber is equivalent of about half

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a staple. That's very rough, but you

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kind of put it in perspective of what we are doing.

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[sound of door closing]

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Chamber a was originally built as a simulation

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for the Apollo missions to test the Apollo capsule

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Back for Apollo, the chamber had to be ready to have

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people put into the chamber inside their vehicle, so it was

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man-rated. It still is man-rated, but we obviously

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don't need to put people on the telescope, so that's not much of a concern for us anymore

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what is a concern is that the telescope has have a very clean environment

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because it's an optical telescope. Actually, right where I'm standing right now,

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several feet back and all the way to the chamber and all the way to both sides of the highbay

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we're going to be installing a very large clean room that will allow

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engineers and technicians to work on the satellite as they are prepping it to go into

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the chamber.

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During the final flight test of James Webb

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it will be in the chamber for, we're anticipating 90 days

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The first, roughly 30 of those days

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we will not be doing anything more than cooling it down

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because its got to radiate all its heat out to those cold shroud

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walls, it will take a long time for it to drift down to its eventual

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operating temperature. Then for the next period of weeks they will be running

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tests on the instrumentation systems and at the end

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it will take us about another two and a half, three weeks to warm it back up so we bring it back out

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into the Houston humidity

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Chamber is

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now the most capable thermal vacuum chamber on the planet