User Controls
James Webb Telescope To Launch Tomorrow---To Infinity And Beyond!
-
2021-12-25 at 3:38 PM UTCABC News
Everything you need to know about the Webb Telescope
On Christmas Day, NASA launched into space its biggest, most expensive and most powerful telescope yet.
The James Webb Space Telescope will rocket into the cosmos and orbit nearly 1 million miles away from Earth.
The telescope will spend five to 10 years studying the formation of the universe’s earliest galaxies, how they compare to today’s galaxies, how our solar system developed and if there is life on other planets.
ABC News explains how the telescope works, how it compares to its predecessor -- the Hubble Telescope -- and what needs to happen for the mission to go just right.
The history of the Webb Telescope
The Webb Telescope was jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
Development first began in 1996, when it was known as the Next Generation Space Telescope, before it was renamed in September 2002 after James Webb, who was the head of NASA in the 1960s and helped launch the Apollo program that eventually went to the moon.
The project suffered from numerous setbacks and delays, including a redesign into 2005, and ended up costing $10 billion.
Construction was completed in 2016, and the Webb Telescope underwent extensive testing before it was approved for launch.
How does it work?
The Webb Telescope is an infrared telescope, meaning it uses infrared radiation to detect objects in space.
It is able to observe celestial bodies, such as stars, nebulae and planets, that are too cool or too faint to be observed in visible light -- what is visible to the human eye.
Infrared radiation is also able to pass through gas and dust, which appear opaque to the human eye, according to NASA.
This is different from the Hubble Telescope, which sees visible light, ultraviolet radiation and near-infrared radiation.
What are the goals of the Webb Telescope?
There are four goals of the Webb Telescope. Firstly, scientists want to study the first stars and galaxies formed right after the Big Bang.
Normally, humans wouldn’t be able to see this because, as light travels through the universe, it gets stretched and becomes infrared, which is invisible to the naked eye.
But an infrared telescope will be able to detect this light, which has been traveling toward Earth for more than 13 billion years, essentially allowing the Webb Big Bang to look back in time.
This leads to the second part of the mission: comparing the galaxies from the past to those of today.
Thirdly, because infrared radiation can pass through astronomical dust, which can’t be viewed on a visible-light telescope -- such as Hubble -- the Webb Telescope will be able to study how stars and planetary systems, such as our solar system, formed, NASA explained.
Lastly, the telescope will study planets outside of our solar system to see if there are any signs of life or if they have atmospheres capable of sustaining life.
What is needed for the mission to be successful?
According to a report conducted by an independent review board in 2018, there were 344 "single-point failures," or steps that needed to work for the mission to succeed.
The telescope was tucked inside the nose of an Ariane 5 rocket and launched from the European Space Agency’s Spaceport in French Guiana around 7:20 a.m. ET, according to the official countdown.
It separated from the rocket after the launch and began unfolding. According to NASA, about 30 minutes after the launch, the solar panels unfolded so the telescope can get power from the sun.
About two hours later, the antenna will deploy, so the telescope can communicate back to Earth.
Three days later, the sunshield, which is 69.5 feet by 46.5 feet -- about the size of a tennis court -- will deploy.
In order for the instruments aboard to work, they need to be kept at extremely cold temperatures: -370 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. The sunshield protects the telescope from the heat of the sun and keeps the instruments cold.
Next, the mirrors will start unfolding and latching into place so they can reflect light.
Overall, it will take 29 days for the telescope to reach the final stop on its journey and settle into orbit nearly 1 million miles from Earth. -
2021-12-25 at 3:50 PM UTCSpace is officially gay
I'm an ocean guy nowThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2021-12-25 at 4:33 PM UTCI sea.
-
2022-01-05 at 4:56 PM UTCAssociated Press
NASA nails trickiest job on newly launched space telescope
By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA aced the most complicated, critical job on its newly launched space telescope Tuesday: unrolling and stretching a sunshade the size of a tennis court.
Ground controllers cheered and bumped fists once the fifth and final layer of the sunshield was tightly secured. It took just 1 1/2 days to tighten the ultra-thin layers using motor-driven cables, half the expected time.
The 7-ton James Webb Space Telescope is so big that the sunshield and the primary gold-plated mirror had to be folded for launch. The sunshield is especially unwieldly — it spans 70 feet by 46 feet (21 meters by 14 meters) to keep all the infrared, heat-sensing science instruments in constant subzero shadow.
The mirrors are next up for release this weekend.
The $10 billion telescope is more than halfway toward its destination 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away, following its Christmas Day send-off. It is the biggest and most powerful observatory ever launched — 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope — enabling it to peer back to almost the beginning of time.
Considered Hubble's successor, Webb will attempt to hunt down light from the universe's first stars and galaxies, created 3.7 billion years ago.
“This is a really big moment," project manager Bill Ochs told the control team in Baltimore. "We’ve still got a lot of work to do, but getting the sunshield out and deployed is really, really big.”
Engineers spent years redoing and tweaking the shade. At one point, dozens of fasteners fell off during a vibration test. That made Tuesday's success all the sweeter, since nothing like this had ever been attempted before in space.
“First time and we nailed it," engineer Alphonso Stewart told reporters. -
2022-01-05 at 5 PM UTC
-
2022-01-05 at 5:01 PM UTC
-
2022-01-05 at 5:02 PM UTCThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
-
2022-01-05 at 5:20 PM UTC
-
2022-01-05 at 5:22 PM UTC
-
2022-01-05 at 5:27 PM UTCAlso historically fat fucks are a relatively modern phenomenon as far as the numbers of them goes, but poor people are not. I was raised in poverty and as thin as a beanpole when I was a kid...fast food and lazy parents is the problem.
A head of lettuce costs 87c at Aldi, a loaf of bread $1, 12oz of lunchmeat $2.49...from that $4.xx you can make a dozen or more sandwiches for LESS than the price of one meal from Mcdonalds...and it's healthier.
Fat fucks be fat fuckin...as my old nutritionist used to say. -
2022-01-05 at 5:29 PM UTC
-
2022-01-05 at 11:11 PM UTC
-
2022-01-06 at 1:44 AM UTCScrew you niggas, i for one am happy the JWST launched according to plan, has deployed 2/3's and is on it's way to the L2 point. Also pretty happy the rocket put it on the best trajectory we could hope for, so that the telescope has to expand minimal fuel to get to it's final destination. That tacked on 5 extra service years. Hell yeah.
-
2022-01-06 at 3:11 AM UTC
Originally posted by Sophie Screw you niggas, i for one am happy the JWST launched according to plan, has deployed 2/3's and is on it's way to the L2 point. Also pretty happy the rocket put it on the best trajectory we could hope for, so that the telescope has to expand minimal fuel to get to it's final destination. That tacked on 5 extra service years. Hell yeah.
You don't know shit about the JWST you bandwagon riding basic bitch. -
2022-01-06 at 3:33 AM UTC
-
2022-01-06 at 4:28 AM UTC
Originally posted by aldra dark matter probably doesn't even exist
it was theorised because certain theories break down at a cosmic scale
maybe they're just wrong
No the thing is that you can simply add 1 Tμν (curvature source) term to the Einstein Field Equations and suddenly they work perfectly to describe what's going on in galactic rotation data etc. We just don't know what that term actually represents. -
2022-01-06 at 4:32 AM UTCJust to be clear, Dark Matter is only a mystery in the sense that the details of the construction of the pyramids are a "mystery": we have a shitload of plausible theories how they COULD have done it but not enough evidence to distinguish THE SPECIFIC way they did it.
Such is also the case with Dark Matter.
There are several theoretical candidates. However at present there's insufficient evidence to tell which one is the right one. -
2022-01-06 at 5:08 AM UTCI still think it's dumb they don't know EXACTLY how the pyramids were built.
-
2022-01-06 at 5:55 AM UTCTechRadar
'We have a telescope': James Webb Space Telescope's secondary mirror is now in place
John Loeffler
After the successful deployment and "tensioning" earlier this week of the five-layered sun shield on the James Webb Space Telescope -- the long awaited successor to the Hubble and a huge leap forward for astronomy -- NASA announced on Wednesday that the telescope's secondary mirror has also been successfully extended.
Extending the boom arm to deploy the secondary mirror on the telescope was one of the major anxiety points for the mission; if something mechanically failed during this process, it would have been non-recoverable and the telescope couldn't work.
Fortunately, the unfolding went off without a hitch, and now we just need to wait for the extension of its now-iconic honeycombed primary mirror later this week, which will be the next critical milestone for the telescope's deployment.
Analysis: this was arguably the most important deployment of the entire mission
What makes the secondary mirror so important? It's one of the few parts of the telescope that simply could not fail to deploy if the mission was to even barely succeed.
Were the sunshield's deployment to fail, Webb wouldn't be able to pick up the deep-infrared light that it was designed to detect, but it could still pick up near-infrared. This would \be an improvement over the Hubble Space Telescope, just not as much of an improvement as we're hoping for.
If the primary mirror fails to deploy successfully later this week, the telescope will lose sensitivity, but it will still be able to function and provide new deep-infrared imagery -- just not as well as we wanted it to.
Without the secondary mirror, however, no light would make it to the telescope's infrared sensors at all, so the mission would immediately fail. No light, no telescope.
So it was absolutely critical that the secondary mirror deployed properly, which it now has.
"We are 600,000 miles from Earth and we have a telescope," announced Bill Ochs, Webb's program manager, to his team after the mirror successfully extended and securely latched into place.
If nothing else, the James Webb Space Telescope should now work in some capacity. After the primary mirror deploys, we'll know how close to working perfectly we'll get. Fingers crossed! -
2022-01-06 at 10:30 AM UTCMore reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model
