New Space Telescope Relies on Never-Before-Manufactured Material; No Problem, Says NASA
NASA engineers working on the James Webb Space Telescope are doing a lot of things from scratch - they've had to design new mirrors and a foldy space cocoon, for instance - but their newest work may take the cake: To survive the coldest reaches of space, they invented a brand-new composite material. They nicknamed it unobtanium. The heart of the Webb Telescope is the car-sized Integrated Science Instrument Module, which will hold all the telescope's instruments, packed tightly together. The scope's high-precision optics need stability, so the chassis must be tough enough to avoid warping in the extreme deep freeze of 1 million miles from Earth. But it also must be tough enough to survive the stress of launch. Engineers combed the scientific literature to find a material that could meet those standards, and came up with nothing. They decided they had to whip something up, so they used mathematical models...