Goddard Space Flight Center design

The Goddard Space Flight Center-led team developed this lightweight design for JWST. It incorporates many of the features found in the other designs: a deployable, 26-foot-wide (nearly 8 meters) primary mirror, a large deployable sunshade to shield the optics, and an orbit 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth at the L2 Lagrangian point, a balancing point between the gravitational tug of the Earth and the Sun. The spacecraft has a deployable sunshade, an umbrella that will keep the telescope chilled -370 degrees Fahrenheit to -298 degrees Fahrenheit (about -183 degrees Celsius), which allows it to see the faint infrared glow of distant objects. With this design, the telescope can view about 40 percent of the sky at any time.