Listening to the NASA briefing about the @NASAWebb telescope launch next month, and heard the phrase
"140 single points of failure"
and now I feel a little ill.
Show this thread
-
Update: There are 344 single-point failure items on the entire spacecraft, about 80% of which are related to the deployment of the sunshield and mirrors. Christ.
Show this thread
Here are 2 things from our lead engineer Paul Geithner that may help: 1. Not all single points of failure (SPF) are high-risk. There are several categories, from fairly benign impact to total loss. We've tracked all 344: where they are, what they are, what category they are in.
-
-
2. Webb is unusual for the scope of its deployments and hence the raw number of its SPFs, but its non-deployment related SPFs are not at all unusual. Many satellites have a large number of SPFs.
-
Thanks folks. I am confident that the entire team has made the deployment process as reliable as is technically possible!
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.