JWST, the most powerful and important telescope ever made, will allow us to reach out into the universe as never before possible for humanity.
After having been successfully launched on Christmas Day 2021 and having passed the most risky stage of the mission, the unfolding of hundreds of processes, of individual implementations, until a telescope can be fully deployed, Webb is heading towards the Lagrange point L2 what is the next step when I get there at the end of January? (will it reach that point on the 24th?)
The telescope is named after James Webb, NASA’s administrator for much of the 1960s, known for his leadership of the agency during the race to the Moon. However, because Webb worked at the State Department early in his career and oversaw policies to purge the department of LGBT employees, some people have called on NASA to change the name of the telescope.
COVID has not only paralyzed the flow of humanity, but also all the important projects that were in development, such as the James Webb and also the Nancy Grace space telescope, which has been delayed due to a slowdown in activity during the pandemic. . They are the collateral effects of the coronavirus. Of course, the delay will be a few months, not years. Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said the launch date for the Nancy Roman telescope, the mother of Hubble, would likely be moved from late 2025 to mid-2026 due to the pandemic. Roman was NASA’s first female chief of astronomy and paved the way for space telescopes focused on the universe at large.
Regarding the James Webb, a collaboration of approximately 17 countries, it is being built and operated by both NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. James Webb will replace Hubble and Spitzer with its unprecedented resolution and sensitivity when it enters orbit in late 2021.
After 15 years of development and $10 billion invested, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is getting closer to launch. Its mission will be to detect the first stars that shine in the cosmos. The telescope will not only deepen our understanding of the Milky Way, but also exoplanets and distant celestial objects. Capable of capturing a wide range of wavelengths of light, JWST also hopes to observe the earliest galaxies in the universe and even find evidence of dark matter.
The James Webb Space Telescope project was first envisioned in 1996 as an ambitious next-generation telescope with a very long and difficult road ahead. The observatory will be well beyond the orbit of the Moon, so once it’s there, it’s on its own, so everything has to be working properly from the start.
Initially, the space telescope was dubbed the Next Generation Space Telescope, NGST (very Star Trek), but in 2002, it received its current name in honor of NASA’s second administrator from 1961 to 1969 during the Apollo program. Webb passed away in 1992 at the age of 85. The election proved controversial in 2015 when it emerged that Webb was involved in the state-sponsored purge of gay and bisexual scientists and civil servants from federal jobs, facilitating discussions of homophobic policies among US senators. Petitions to change the name of JWST have been numerous in recent years from astronomers and science communicators, including Sarah Tuttle, Lucianne Walkowicz, Brian Nord and Matthew Francis.
A large mirror is needed to reflect light from objects in space. This amplifies the light on the secondary mirror, allowing the telescope’s instruments a broader, clearer view of the heavens. In this case, James Webb is almost twice as big as the Hubble telescope (which is 13 meters long). The gigantic base of its parasol measures 22 meters by 12 meters, about the same size as a tennis court. And despite being considerably larger than Hubble, JWST weighs almost half as much: 6,500 kg. JWST’s gold-plated mirrors have a total diameter of 6.5 m, much larger than Hubble’s 2.4-m-diameter plate. Overall, the JWST will have a view that is about 15 times wider than its predecessor.
It will examine objects more than 13.6 billion light-years away in the infrared. Due to the time it takes for light to travel through the universe, this means that you will see objects approximately 100 million to 250 million years after the Big Bang. It will be the furthest in time ever observed by mankind.
It will be 100 times more powerful than Hubble. By looking in infrared light, the telescope can observe the cosmos in greater detail than ever before. Its mirrors, 10 centimeters thick and 6.5 meters wide, act as a gigantic mirror that will allow it to observe distant objects in the universe better than any other instrument in the world, both because of its size and because of its location far from Earth. Land. Hubble is in a very close orbit around the earth, while Webb will be 1.5 million kilometers away.
Ref: NASA WEBB