"We've nailed it." NASA and Northrop Grumman officials doing a presser now about the successful deployment of JWST's sunshield, which needed to work for all the rest of it to work "It was a wonderful moment. There was a lot of joy. A lot of relief," says Hillary Stock of Northrop Grumman. The team seems kind of.. in shock that it worked?!

Good morning from a very snowy DC, a slight change of scene from French Guiana's humid rainforests.

It's a big week for JWST, which is in the process of deploying itself in space as it travels to its final destination 1 million miles from Earth. theatlantic.com/science/archiv… Bill Ochs, JWST project manager, says at a press conference that the team, working 12-hour shifts, is still in the "getting-to-know-you phase" of deployment—figuring out how JWST behaves in space

Good morning from Kourou. This morning we’re watching JWST and its rocket roll out to the launchpad. On the way there now, and the colors of the jungle here are just the richest green The Guiana Space Center’s Final Assembly Building, known as BAF, from a distance. There’s a very expensive space telescope in there, all folded up and ready for launch. We’ll get closer soon.

A beautiful day here in Kourou, where it’s extremely sunny one moment and pouring rain the next. Nonstop chirping from birds I’ve never heard before. T-minus 3ish days until JWST launches.

Here’s my story on the science, with more dispatches to come theatlantic.com/science/archiv… These golden hexagons are everywhere in town

1/ Thread: I'm pretty sure that my beat is not just space exploration, but also Space Feels. Want to feel oddly sad about Earth and the moon growing apart? Here you go: theatlantic.com/science/archiv… 2/ Have you met the tiny Mars helicopter that’s just trying to do its best? It’s cute, and will probably shatter into pieces someday theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

Harris is swearing in Bill Nelson as NASA administrator today. According to pool reports, there's a moon rock, collected during Apollo 16, at the ceremony.

https://twitter.com/VP/status/1388547843288350725

In attendance this morning:
-Nan Ellen Nelson, Nelson's wife, and his son Bill Nelson Jr.
-Charlie Bolden (former NASA admin under Obama)
Pam Melroy (current nominee for deputy NASA admin)
Jim Bridenstine (former NASA admin under Trump, attending virtually)

Senior administration officials just held a call with reporters about the National Space Council, a 1980s-era advisory group that the Trump admin revived and which the Biden admin has decided to keep. Quick thread of highlights.. Kamala Harris will chair the council (as Pence and other VPs did, per executive order) and will "put her own stamp on it." She plans to put an emphasis on supporting commercial space activities, “advancing peaceful norms” in space, climate change, cybersecurity in space, STEM.

Take me to Pluto's icy dunes from the New Horizons spacecraft's flyby in 2015 nasa.gov/image-feature/…

Take two. Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are suiting up again. Liftoff—weather permitting—is 3.22 pm ET.

Here's the backstory: theatlantic.com/science/archiv… On their way to the launchpad, a 9-mile drive, in a Tesla Model X

1/ I did not expect, when @jacqklimas asked NASA officials why it's taken this long to have an all-female spacewalk, to hear this answer: theatlantic.com/science/archiv… 2/ Nor did I expect, when I asked them whether the issue was with spacesuit design, not women's bodies, to get this one:

1/ A thread about the big exoplanet news that was announced today, which—to be perfectly honest—was challenging for me to parse and report.. theatlantic.com/science/archiv… 2/ Like other journos, I learned of this discovery through an embargoed press release about a new paper. Then things got weird. I found out that *another* team was working on the same discovery

1/ I talked to Don Sousa, the person in charge of shipping and handling hundreds of computer disk drives to and from the telescopes that captured that wild photo of the black hole theatlantic.com/science/archiv… 2/ Why disk drives? Well, the telescopes collected five petabytes of data. The average iPhone has 64 gigabytes of data storage. There are 1 million gigabytes in one petabyte. It would have taken years for all that data to cross the internet