12/30/2023 0 Comments James webb space telescope at its![]() The Webb’s golden mirror is a giant leap for telescopes of its kind These are two Hubble images of the Pillars of Creation. Here’s a guide to what the Webb is capable of. The Webb is a machine for answering unanswered questions about the universe, for exploring what has been unexplorable until now. It will allow scientists to make careful studies of numerous exoplanets - planets that orbit stars other than our sun - and even embark on a search for signs of life there. It will allow astronomers to look not only farther out in space but also further back in time: It will search for the first stars and galaxies of the universe. The Webb will surpass the Hubble in several ways. “And yeah, we’re excited to see what’s there.” “We’re going right up to the edge of the observable universe with Webb,” says Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. But the wait will be worth it, at least according to the scientists who expect new and revealing glimpses of our universe. Its price tag ballooned to $10 billion, and it’s way overdue. The Webb was originally supposed to launch in 2010 and cost around $1 billion. After more than three decades in space, it’s unclear how much longer this boundary-breaking satellite will be able to scan and photograph the universe. Scientists started thinking about a follow-up even before the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990. “We’ve been waiting for this a very long time.” “The Webb represents the culmination of decades, if not centuries, of astronomy,” says Sara Seager, a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at MIT. Accor d ing to NASA, more than 300 potential technical problems, or “single point failures,” could potentially doom the mission.īut when it fully deploys in space, the Webb will usher in a new age of astronomy, scientists say, and show humanity things it has never seen before. Over the course of several weeks, it needs to unfurl its various components, from its sunshield to its mirrors. The telescope is so large it needed to launch folded up inside a rocket. On its journey, the telescope has to complete a difficult mechanical maneuver: assembling itself. Now the telescope is on its way to a point nearly a million miles away from the Earth. On Christmas, NASA launched the Webb from French Guiana in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. These are not the plot of a new science fiction movie, but the mission objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Understanding the origins of the universe. Follow us on Twitter and on Facebook.Exploring strange new worlds. ![]() However, after launch, the mission team now expects that Webb will have "significantly more than a 10-year science lifetime," thanks to the job the Ariane 5 did on launch day, NASA officials wrote in a post-launch statement.Įmail Chelsea Gohd at or follow her on Twitter. It was previously thought that the observatory might operate for just 5 to 10 years in space because of its limited propellant supply and the fact that it was not intended to be refueled. Following this cooldown, Webb will spend about five months perfectly aligning and calibrating its optics and scientific instruments. It will take weeks still for this cooling to be completed and for Webb to reach a stable temperature. Once orbiting L2, Webb will begin cooling down and turning on its four scientific instruments. James Webb Space Telescope: The engineering behind a 'first light machine' that is not allowed to fail James Webb Space Telescope: The scientific mysteries no other observatory could unravel NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope launches on epic mission to study early universe So, they launched Webb with not quite enough thrust to get all the way to its final stop, allowing it to complete the final leg of the journey with its own small thrusters and the small amount of propellant that's onboard. Webb and its instruments need to stay extremely cold in order to work as designed and pick up on the ultra-faint heat signatures from the early universe. That situation would require turning Webb around to thrust back toward Earth, which would expose its instruments to the sun, overheating them, according to NASA. The Ariane 5 rocket that launched Webb to space didn't send it all the way to L2, because the mission team wanted to make sure the observatory didn't overshoot its final destination. This maneuver was built into the mission plan for safety's sake. EST (1900 GMT) today, according to the blog post. Once it arrived near L2, Webb began what's called a mid-course correction burn (MCC2), which is an insertion burn, a maneuver that saw scope fire its small thrusters to get into orbit around L2. The burn took about five minutes (297 seconds) and began at about 2 p.m.
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