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Engineer Nithin Abraham Beneath Chamber A

Hidden beneath Chamber A at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston is an area engineers used to test critical contamination control technology that has helped keep NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope clean during cryogenic testing.

 

This voluminous area is called the plenum, and it supports the weight of the chamber above as well as houses some of the cabling and plumbing for it. 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.

 

Nithin Abraham, a coatings engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is part of a contamination control team tasked with ensuring Webb remains as clean as possible during its testing in Chamber A. She 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.

 

Here Abraham places a molecular adsorber coating (MAC) panel in the plenum of Chamber A.

 

Read the full story: go.nasa.gov/2hP1XhC

 

Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

 

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Uploaded on October 24, 2017
Taken on May 18, 2015