NASA officials announced in December 2006 that these microshutters—little doors with an average width of three to six human hairs that open and shut like the shutter on a camera—passed stringent tests designed to assure that they can withstand the rough ride into space and then operate over long periods of time while in space.

Specifically, the microshutters, which have been six-years in design and development, will work inside a camera onboard a European-built spectrograph called the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). One microshutter has an area of 100 microns by 200 microns, where one micron is one-millionth of a meter. Each microshutter is just one of over 62,000 shutters within a grid-like array. The NIRS telescope will contain four of these arrays.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an infrared space observatory that will replace the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST is being constructed and will be operated jointly by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), ESA (European Space Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). Its proposed launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Center (Kourou, French Guiana), is scheduled for no sooner than a June 2013 launch. The telescope will be launched into an orbit about 1.5 million kilometers (0.9 million miles) from the Earth—a distance called the Lagrangian-2 (L2) point.

The multi-object NIRSpec is being built by the ESA at the European Space Research and Technology Center in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The MIRSpec can observe up to 100 objects at one time in a nine square-arcminute field-of-view. The project scientist for NIRSpec is Dr. Peter Jakobsen of ESA’s Space Science Department.

Senior astrophysicist (GSFC Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics) S. Harvey Moseley, the principle investigator for the microshutters, said about the new technology: “The microshutters are a remarkable engineering feat that will have applications both in space and on the ground, even outside of astronomy in biotechnology, medicine and communications.”

Additional information about microshutter technology aboard the James Webb Space Telescope can be found at: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/microshutters.html.

The NASA home Web page for the James Webb Space Telescope is: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/.

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