Narration:

Transcript:

To make use of every square inch of available space on board satellites, engineers have had to design extremely small, lightweight, highly reliable parts. In order to design and implement a computer sophisticated enough to accomplish this, a large number of parts had to be housed in a very small area or volume. Microelectronics allowed us to get as many as 2000 electronic components into a very small silicon integrated circuit. The ability to open and close over 62,000 individual little doors

is really what is enabling some of the science for the James Webb Space Telescope. Each individual shutter is 100 by 200 microns, or about the size of a few hairs. There are four arrays, each with 62,000 shutters, meaning the entire instrument has just over a quarter of a million shutters.