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What Lurks Below NASA’s Chamber A?

 Coatings engineer Nithin Abraham
Hidden beneath Chamber A at the Johnson Space Center is an area engineers used to test critical contamination control technology that has helped keep our James Webb Space Telescope clean during cryogenic testing.

Hidden beneath Chamber A at the Johnson Space Center is an area engineers used to test critical contamination control technology that has helped keep our James Webb Space Telescope clean during cryogenic testing. This voluminous area is called the plenum, and it supports the weight of the chamber. Before Webb’s cryogenic testing in the chamber commenced, engineers ventured to the plenum’s depths to test NASA-developed technology designed to remove molecular contaminants from the air.

This image shows Nithin Abraham, a coatings engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, part of a contamination control team tasked with ensuring Webb remains as clean as possible during its testing. Abraham is the principal investigator of the coatings research team that has developed and tested a highly porous material called molecular adsorber coating (MAC), which can be sprayed onto surfaces to passively capture contaminants that could be harmful to Webb’s optics and science instruments.

Image Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn