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Things are getting tense for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

On Monday (Jan. 3), James Webb Space Telescope controllers began tightening the tension on its massive sunshield, a five-layer shield the size of a tennis court designed to keep the $10 billion observatory cool enough for science. 

The task is the final step in unfolding Webb's sunshield, and should take up to three days to complete. With Webb being so new to space — the $10 billion observatory only launched on Dec. 25 — the tensioning was delayed by two days as engineers took a break for the New Year's Day holiday on Saturday (Jan. 1) and worked through couple of minor issues on Sunday.

Engineers are now tensioning the first layer of the sunshield, which will continue through Monday if that goes to plan. Once complete, the Webb team will assess the deployment success and adapt the following four layers as required. The schedule calls for the deployment to finish on Wednesday (Jan. 5), but the timing of layer tensioning (and even the entire deployment) may vary depending on the engineering data Webb produces during its sequence.

Webb specializes in heat-sensitive infrared observations, making the sunshield a vital component of the observatory. The sunshield is part of a month-long deployment procedure to get the Hubble Space Telescope successor ready for gathering data from a distant point from Earth, nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) away from our planet. 

As Webb executes the deployment, it is making the journey to its destination — a stable gravitational area called sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2), which allows the spacecraft to "park" with a minimum of fuel usage to stay steady. Since most of Webb's deployment steps are controlled by the ground, this control allows engineers to make pauses in the deployment procedure to assess any issues as they arise. 

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