Safe Vibration and Acoustic Testing Using Data Reduction

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest space telescope ever created, has been undergoing vibration testing at NASA since December 2016.  

NASA finished the second axis vibration testing on the JWST using our 280-channel m+p VibRunner based m+p VibControl data reduction system. Specially for this project we added abort limit testing on the data reduction channels. Twice that abort limit testing detected anomalies during the vibration testing and shut down the control system, preventing damaging the 4 billion dollars spacecraft.

m+p’s data reduction and Acoustic control systems were also used for the acoustic testing of the science payload. The test was successful without any abort.

Read more in the following article published on the NASA website:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-restarts-rigorous-vibration-testing-on-the-james-webb-space-telescope

Or watch this video showing the testing for which we developed the aborts in the data reduction software:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CznJU1FD1Cg

Read more about the acoustic and vibration tests of the James Webb Space Telescope:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-completes-acoustic-and-vibration-tests