Abstract
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project is an international collaboration led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. When JWST launches in October 2018 it will be NASA’s flagship astronomical observatory. With the telescope operating nearly a million miles away at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point where servicing is currently not feasible, it is imperative that we have high confidence in the optical performance capability of JWST and that this performance is well-understood before launch. Critical to the JWST optical performance is the alignment and stability of the Tertiary Mirror Assembly and Fine Steering Mirror assembly within the Aft Optics Subsystem (AOS). This paper will discuss the test program conducted at Ball Aerospace to determine the critical alignment of the mirrors within the AOS at cryogenic operational temperatures. This test program included a series of opto-mechanical measurements using both traditional and novel approaches along with detailed modeling to measure structure alignments at both ambient and cryogenic temperatures.
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