7 Things You Didn’t Know About Webb, NASA’s $10 Billion Space Telescope On The Cusp Of A Nervous Launch
The biggest and best space telescope ever developed and built, Webb—originally planned to launch in 2007—will be a technological marvel and could change astronomy forever. Here are seven things you ned to know about it:
1. It’s going a million miles from here
Unlike Hubble, which orbits Earth and was visited by NASA astronauts for fixes and upgrades, Webb is going a million miles away to Lagrange Point 2—so Webb almost certainly can’t be fixed if anything goes wrong (though never write-off NASA).NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or “Webb” for short) is due to go skywards—at long, long last—on December 18, 2021.
The biggest and best space telescope ever developed and built, Webb—originally planned to launch in 2007—will be a technological marvel and could change astronomy forever. Here are seven things you ned to know about it:
1. It’s going a million miles from here
Unlike Hubble, which orbits Earth and was visited by NASA astronauts for fixes and upgrades, Webb is going a million miles away to Lagrange Point 2—so Webb almost certainly can’t be fixed if anything goes wrong (though never write-off NASA).
L2 is four times the distance of the Earth to the Moon, on the opposite side to the Sun. The gravity of the Earth and Sun combine here to create a relatively stable location. Webb will get there about 50 days after launch.
2. It’s shaped like a ‘golden sunflower’
Webb’s primary mirror is fashioned from beryllium and made-up of 18 hexagonal segments, each one covered in a super-thin layer of gold because it’s perfect for reflecting infrared light.
3. It’s six times more powerful than Hubble
It’s got a 6.6 meter mirror—compared to the Hubble Space Telescope’s 2.4-meter—which means six times more collecting power. However, we shouldn’t really compare Webb with Hubble. While the latter looks at the Universe mainly in visible light, Webb is an infrared telescope.
4. It will show us things never seen before
The parts of the Universe that Webb wants to look at are packed with dust and gas, so visible light can’t get through.
In that way Webb is more of a successor to the Spitzer Space Telescope—another infrared space telescope—though it’s many times more sensitive. Webb will therefore show us things never before seen by any other telescope. Infrared is basically heat, so ..
5. Webb will the coldest space telescope ever
Since infrared is heat, Webb has to be very cold. After all, you don’t want it glowing brighter than the faint heat signals it’s there to detect.
The five-layer, tennis court-sized sunshield that acts like a parasol and separates the observatory into a warm, sun-facing side (about 230ºF) and a cold side (about -385ºF-233ºC). It’s made of kapton and the vacuum between the layers acts as an insulator.
6. It will look back almost to the Big Bang
Webb’s sensitivity to infrared light means it will be able to see the light from the first stars —300 times more massive than the Sun—and the faintest, earliest galaxies.
It will help astronomers figure how the complex galaxies they see now evolved.
7. It will look for the building blocks of life in alien planets
Webb isn’t going to discover more exoplanets. Instead it’s going to study the exoplanets we have found that astronomers reckon could be Earth-like. It will study the light visible in their atmospheres as they transit their star. That light will contain tell-tale sighs of the chemicals within, with the hit-list including methane, water and carbon dioxide.
Webb is due to launch on from the European Spaceport on an Ariane-5 rocket on Saturday, December 18, 2021.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
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