NASA Public Affairs Officer Dan Huot recently visited Johnson Space Center’s 400,000 cubic foot vacuum chamber, Chamber A, and spoke with Mary Cerimele, the lab manager for this historic facility.
Upgrades have been made to the facility, which is one of the largest vacuum chambers in the world, to prepare it for testing NASA’s deep space James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists plan to use the Webb telescope to see further back into history than ever before.
Chamber A has been used in component tests for Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, space shuttle, International Space Station, Department of Defense communication antennas and various other large-scale satellite systems.
The chamber and its impressive 40-foot diameter door have even been featured in several movies such as “Armageddon” and “Futureworld.” As Cerimele jokes, “It’s our resident diva.”
Since 2007, the chamber has been significantly modified to support testing of the Webb telescope the agency’s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Scheduled to launch in 2018, it will fly in deep space orbit more than a million miles from Earth. To ensure it will function in the extreme environment of space, Chamber A will be equipped with instruments to measure and evaluate the shape and focus of the mirrors.
“Originally the chamber could go to about -300 degrees Fahrenheit,” Cerimele points out, “but in order to test the James Webb Space Telescope we need it to operate around -440 degrees Fahrenheit.” With its modifications, Chamber A can get much colder than any other facility its size — and stay that way throughout a 90-day test.
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