A team of engineers and technicians at Ball Aerospace, one of the industry partners for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has finished assembling the spacecraft's giant camera. Called the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), this state-of-the-art tool will enable astronomers to explore the cosmos from the outskirts of our solar system to the edge of the observable universe.
"The year-long integration effort culminates in the instrument's first baseline performance testing, where we turn on the instrument to ensure it's working as expected," said Mary Walker, Roman's WFI instrument manager at Goddard."Now the team is ready to take the instrument through key environmental testing to show it can withstand the harsh conditions of launch and in space.
The Ball team provided four components for the WFI: the stable optical structure, element wheel assembly, thermal management system, and alignment compensation mechanism. The Goddard team provided the critical optical elements, focal plane system, relative calibration system, and the instrument command and data handling electronics.
After completing final integration, Ball Aerospace technicians transport the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Instrument into Ball's largest thermal vacuum chamber to begin environmental testing at a Ball facility in Boulder, Colorado. Credit: Ball Aerospace A close-up view of Roman's Wide Field Instrument, currently wrapped in a multi-layer insulation for testing. Credit: Ball Aerospacetogether in a clean room in Boulder, Colorado, mechanically and electrically integrating the components into one system. Now, the team will complete full environmental testing in space-like conditions before delivering the WFI to Goddard in summer 2024.
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