Long before NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, one of its highest-level mission goals was already established: to seek out signs of ancient life on the Martian surface.

Engineers working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have successfully folded and packed its sunshield for its upcoming million-mile (roughly 1.5 million kilometer) journey, which begins later this year.

The sunshield—a five-layer, diamond-shaped structure the size of a tennis court—was specially engineered to fold up around the two sides of the telescope and fit within the confines of its launch vehicle, the Ariane 5 rocket. Now that folding has been completed at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, the sunshield will remain in this compact form through launch and the first few days the observatory will spend in space.

Designed to protect the telescope's optics from any heat sources that could interfere with its sight, the sunshield is one of Webb's most critical and complex components.

When NASA sends astronauts back to the moon as part of the Artemis Program, they will be taking the long view. Rather than being another "footprints and flags" program, the goal is to create a lasting infrastructure that will ensure a "sustained program of lunar exploration." A major element in this plan is the Lunar Gateway, an orbital habitat that astronauts will use to venture to and from the surface.

The first step in establishing the Gateway is the deployment of two critical modules—the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) and the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE). According to a recent update, NASA (along with Maxar Technologies and Busek Co.) recently completed a hot-fire test of the PPE propulsion subsystem—the first of many that will ensure that the PPE and HALO will be ready for launch by 2024.

This propulsion subsystem is a cluster of Hall effect thrusters (aka ion engines), which use electromagnetic fields to accelerate ionized gas through engine nozzles to generate thrust. In this case, the engine system is a 6-kilowatt solar electric propulsion (SEP) concept that incorporates Maxar-built electronics and a xenon feed system with four Busek-built BHT-600 thrusters.