My understanding is that not only did the heat shield have to unfurl, but construct a particular geometry such that it created a waveguide to channel the light

My understanding is that not only did the heat shield have to unfurl, but construct a particular geometry such that it created a waveguide to channel the light out the sides and avoid too much entrapment or too slow of transport. Being the material it is, there’s also no way to model exactly how it will unfurl so it’s difficult to develop. Just the metrology effort on the ground to validate the shape was quite great. The sun shield is held up as this big challenge but I don’t think they do a good job explaining why it was so difficult. There’s a popular YouTube whose father was a metrologist working on the sun shield. https://youtu.be/Pu97IiO_yDI https://youtu.be/Pu97IiO_yDI