kellylepo , 5 days ago

I went on a tour of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center today with a group of students. The highlight was seeing (parts of) the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope being tested in the massive clean room.

From left to right, we see the spacecraft bus (where the computers, communications equipment, and propellent are housed), spare solar panels, and the coronagraph instrument (under the silver tent thing, near the wall of air filters).

Closeup of the Roman telescope bus. A white metal structure holds a metal cylindrical ring with ridges. Behind this is the six-sided telescope bus structure. It is covered in shiny, metallic kapton, and has several smaller red boxes are connected by wires.
In the foreground, three people, dressed in white, protective "bunny suits", work on the back half of the telescope bus. It is a large, metal plate that is being held up by supports on its side, like a portable chalkboard. The people working on it have to stand on a stepladder to reach the top. Many pieces of equipment, which look like boxes wrapped like presents are fixed to the metal plate. In the middle of the clean room, near the left edge of the frame, are two people in bunny suits. One waves to the camera. In the background are the spare solar panels, arranged like a huge room dividing panel screen. The panels are at least twice the height of the people standing next to them. They are arranged three across and two high.
Equipment sits in the NASA Goddard clean room, a large, 4-story white room. On the right wall are rows of orange squares, which are a wall of air filters. In the bottom right corner of the frame is a rectangular, silvery tent-like structure that is open in the front. Inside is the coronograph instrument, which is wrapped in metallic kapton, and sitting inside a white metal support.