NASA's New Telescope Will Show Us the Infancy of the Universe

[Zorro]

Twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope will enable scientists to see deeper into the past than ever before.

Next month, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to take a slow boat from Los Angeles, spend a few days traversing the Panama Canal, and arrive at a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The telescope will have been twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making. Thousands of scientists and engineers from fourteen countries will have worked on it. It could have flown, sure, but it’s a tight squeeze—plus the telescope weighs seven tons, and Kourou’s airfield is connected to its spaceport by seven bridges not built to endure such a load. The telescope will be put into Ariane 5, a European rocket named for a mythical princess who helped a man she loved defeat the Minotaur and escape a maze. Ariane 5 will carry the telescope some ten thousand kilometres in thirty minutes. The J.W.S.T. will then continue on its own, for twenty-nine days, toward a lonely, lovely orbit in space, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, where we will never visit it, though it will stay in constant communication with us. From Earth, it will appear ten thousand times fainter than the faintest star.

On its way, the telescope will slowly unfurl five silvery winglike layered sheets of Kapton foil, about as large as a tennis court. These sheets, each thinner than notebook paper, will function as a gigantic parasol, protecting the body of the telescope from the light and the heat of the sun, moon, and Earth. In this way, the J.W.S.T. will be kept nearly as dark and as cold as outer space, to insure that distant signals aren’t washed out. Then eighteen hexagons of gold-coated beryllium mirror will open out, like an enormous, night-blooming flower. The mirrors will form a reflecting surface as tall and as wide as a house, and they will capture light that has been travelling for more than thirteen billion years.

This is the hope, at least.

“Oh, gee, I worry all the time,” said Marcia Rieke, an infrared astronomer based in Tucson, who has devoted much of the past two decades to the J.W.S.T. “Even the rocket, which is the most reliable rocket out there, it still has some tiny chance of exploding at launch.” Rieke, who has astrology-blue eyes and a no-nonsense ponytail, is the scientific lead for the near-infrared camera, known as the nirCam, which is one of four main research instruments on the telescope. She is an expert on the formation of galaxies, and the nirCam will allow us to see light from billions of years ago, when the earliest galaxies and stars were formed. I spoke with Rieke over Zoom, where she had as a background a lunar eclipse she photographed in Sabino Canyon, which is near her home but looks like it’s on Mars. “I’ve spent decades in this field, and there’s still so much I don’t know,” she said.

In 2017, Rieke and her team went to the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, where tests would be performed on the nirCam and other Webb instruments. They wanted to expose the telescope to the extremely cold conditions of outer space. Hurricane Harvey hit while they were there. “While I was at the airport waiting to fly out to Houston, I was watching the forecast and fortunately was able to change my car rental to an S.U.V.,” Rieke said. “So I was able to ferry the members of the team between their hotels and the Space Center. They brought in really nice catering for us. I’m not sure how they managed that.” Imagine sealing one’s gold-plated work of decades in a giant pressure cooker and then pouring liquid nitrogen on top of it—that resembles the exposure test. The telescope was in Chamber A, the gigantic vacuum chamber at the Space Center where the command module for Apollo was tested. Remarkably, Rieke’s team accomplished its mission. Rieke has seen the J.W.S.T. survive not only Hurricane Harvey but also numerous threats of cancellation, along with delays that have serially shifted the launch from an original date of 2010 to late 2021. I asked Rieke what she was most looking forward to seeing. “I’m looking forward to seeing that it works,” she said. “I’ll start sleeping better about thirty days after it’s been launched. Launch isn’t even the riskiest step in deploying the nirCam.” Once the telescope is up and running, Rieke will return to studying events that happened in our universe billions of years before Earth was formed.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/16/nasas-new-telescope-will-show-us-the-infancy-of-the-universe

I've been looking forward to this launch for many, many years.

[Tommymac]

1. Very Cool.

Thanks for the article...Godspeed JWST

[Takket]

2. i've been looking forward to this for years...

the project has been delayed many times but this telescope is going to give us insight like nothing we have ever seen. I just hope the launch goes okay because that is obviously the biggest probability of disaster...

[Tikki]

3. Looking forward to looking in the past.

The J.W.S.T. has to be the most amazing thing happening in quite a while.

Tikki

[Moebym]

4. I hope the launch goes off without a hitch

And that it works as designed. If it does, and I have every expectation that it will, it will expand our breadth of knowledge of the early universe and exoplanets beyond our wildest imagination.

[keithbvadu2]

5. Yesterday's technology...

Yesterday's technology... In our manufacturing world, items on the production line are modified as new technology becomes available.

Newer functions, more efficient processes, and such are Incorporated into the product even as it goes down the production line. Cars, weapons systems, computers, household appliances... Even as this space telescope was being designed, developed and built, newer technologies are being developed as it is on the way to its final destination out there in space.


Early adopters get the newest of the new and even as they are paying for it on their charge card, something newer is coming along.

Still, it's a really neat ten billion$ astrophysics toy.

[Dial H For Hero]

6. Calling this a "toy" seems rather dismissive.