The James Webb Space Telescope makes stunning images thanks to these engineering solutions - Space.com

To make a groundbreaking telescope, engineers had to go above and beyond.

Those engineers and others went on to invent 10 brand new technologies in order to build what is now the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb), an observatory designed to do things that once seemed impossible.

Engineers at contractors like Northrop Grumman, the main private company that worked on Webb with NASA, were the ones to develop, test and build the telescope?

Webb is an infrared telescope, and since infrared radiation is shed as heat, the telescope's instruments had to be kept close to absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible in the universe.

Gallery: James Webb Space Telescope's 1st photos.

Engineers needed to make much of Webb's mirrors out of a material that wouldn't break in the extreme cold but was also super-light, since the telescope's mirror would be nearly 10 times bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror but also needed to be much lighter or the observatory would be too heavy to launch. .

First, the engineers had to make sure the mirror deformed the same way every time they got it extremely cold.

In order to keep the telescope so cold, engineers needed to block out any trace of sunlight, a challenge they tackled by building a giant sunshield the size of a tennis court. .

The two layers closest to the sun also have a silicon coating on the side facing the sun to reflect as much light and heat back into space as possible, so the engineers were working with complex materials.

The layers aren't parallel to each other — they're angled precisely to make sure any heat made by the spacecraft part of the observatory never makes it to the telescope and can "bounce its way out.".

Like the rest of the telescope, engineers had to test the backplane in cryogenic temperatures.

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