Inside a giant clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the pathfinder telescope, a practice section of the James Webb Space Telescope, stands fully assembled. Teams of engineers built and aligned the pathfinder telescope to rehearse assembly and testing before the actual telescope is built. After the team installs the test sensors and completes their final close out, the pathfinder telescope will be shipped to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas for cryo-optical testing.
Text credit: NASA/Laura Betz
Image credit: NASA/Chris Gunn