Slated to replace the now aging Hubble Space Telescope, is the James Webb Telescope deserve the moniker “Rare Earth Telescope” due to the amount of rare earth elements needed to make it do its cosmic exploration?
By: Ringo Bones
Insiders from Lockheed Martin often joked that its rare
earth element content equals that of three Predator drones, but why does the
James Webb Space Telescope need such prodigious amounts of rare earth elements
to do its intended function in exploring the cosmos? Well, maybe it has to do
on where the new space telescope will be finally situated.
Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which is situated in low
Earth orbit 250 miles or 400 kilometers above us, the James Webb Space
Telescope will be situated 1-million miles from the Earth so any fixing by NASA
astronauts in case of a post launch in-space field repairs will be much, much
harder than the Hubble fix in low Earth orbit by EVAing astronauts back in the
early 1990s. The unfurling of the James Webb Space Telescope’s over-sized
mirrors and heat shield 1 million miles in space must go as planned or it will
become a sad multi-billion US dollar astronomical blunder.
In order for the James Webb Space Telescope to achieve
reliability in the hostile vacuum and near absolute zero cold of outer space,
its servo motors are especially made with advanced proprietary samarium rare
earth magnets that can still reliably function at 2.7 Kelvin – the average
temperature of the hard vacuum of outer space. These servo motors not only
unfurl the over-sized mirrors once the space telescopes arrive in a point in
space 1-million miles away from Earth but also the aluminized gold plated mylar
heat shield that would protect the James Webb Space Telescope’s main mirror
from the relentless unfiltered glare of the Sun.
