Years behind schedule and billions over budget, the James Webb Space Telescope — is finally poised for launch on a make-or-break mission to peer all the way back to nearly the Big Bang that created the cosmos.
Years behind schedule and billions over budget, the James Webb Space Telescope — 100 times more powerful than the iconic— is finally poised for launch on a make-or-break mission to peer all the way back to nearly the Big Bang that created the cosmos.
Once in space, the hair-thin layers must be deployed, precisely pulled taut and separated by 16 to 18 inches to dissipate heat that otherwise would overwhelm and blind the telescope's sensors. A view of JWST with its sunshade fully deployed during testing at Northrop Grumman. Six of its 18 hexagonal mirror segments must be folded back out of the way to fit inside the nose cone of its Ariane 5 rocket. After they are unfolded in space, motors on the back of each segment will tip and tilt all 18 as needed to achieve a razor-sharp focus. / Credit: NASA
Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates in low-Earth orbit where spacewalking shuttle astronauts could correct the focus of its famously flawed mirror, Webb is bound for a parking place a million miles away, far beyond the reach of any repair crew."This is about the hardest thing we've ever done for NASA astronomy," Nobel laureate John Mather, the Webb program scientist, said in an interview. "And we've put more work into it than you can imagine.
Once on station, the 13,700-pound Webb will always be on Earth's night side and its sunshade will ensure light and heat from the sun, Earth and moon are always blocked out. "All I know is, at the end of two weeks when the sunshield is done, and the telescope's done and all we have to do is like start moving mirrors, our risk posture will take a step the better. And I know there's going to be a lot of sighs of relief and a lot of smiling faces when we get past that two-week point.
"But what we haven't been able to see are the very first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang," said Amber Straughn, a NASA astrophysicist on the Webb project. Along with snapping baby pictures of the infant universe, Webb will shed light on how galaxies evolve and perhaps help resolve one of the great mysteries in astronomy: does galaxy formation create the supermassive black holes at the hearts of most large galaxies? Or do black holes trigger galaxy formation?
The telescope's ability to probe the infant universe is the primary reason astronomers in the 1990s first lobbied for a large infrared telescope in space. But it's just one of the areas the telescope may well revolutionize, including one topic it wasn't even built to study: exoplanets. Stefanie Milam, deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said giant ground-based telescopes on the drawing board or already under construction will expand the search for exoplanets and the study of their atmospheres.
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