Slashdot Mirror
NASA Unveils Hubble's Successor
dalutong writes "BBC News has an article detailing NASA's replacement for the much-loved Hubble telescope. The $4.5 billion telescope will be placed in orbit 1.5 million km from Earth and will be almost three times the size of the Hubble. It is set to launch in 2013. They also plan to service the Hubble in 2008."
... who's going to fix it????
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Although it will see further than Hubble, JWST will see infrared, so that we still need Hubble for the visible and ultraviolet.
An servicing the Hubble is judged to be so risky that NASA originally did not plan to do it. Now they intend to do it, but with a backup shuttle in orbit in case the first one gets into trouble.
Just like the way DARPA (or whomever) mucked with the mirror on Hubble so they could see what I'm typing from orbit, we can expect 'extra-curricular' uses for JWST.
The Admin and the Engineer
How long is that lame /. poll going to stay????
Move on to the next subject!!!!
I have Karma to burn....mod's do not hold any fear for me!!!!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Is it just me or does the JWST look kind of like Barbie's Imperial Star Destroyer?
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I think Gaia probe is more interesting, and it is planned to be launched in 2011 not in 2013 as JWST
No, not the senator; it's named after James Webb, Commodore Governor for the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador for 1760.
While difficult, its much cheaper and easier to get hubble-style resolution in the optical range from ground.
Dont forget that "hugely expensive" for a ground telescope is compareable to "dirt-cheap" for a space-based one.
All 4 of the VLT telescopes were (IIRC) cheaper than a single hubble service mission. And OWL should be compareable to a modern space-telescope, too, for a fraction of the price (dont forget: its a tradeoff: better seeing vs "have to design a mirrror that can withstand the acceleraion and fits the launch vehicle).
Also, i think the huge bias on that single octave of electromagnetic radiation is out of proportion.
There arent even that many useful lines in it
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Why are you spending money to have an internet connection, when you could give the money to people starving on this planet? Do you know what that money could buy for some poor people?
As radiation travels from distant stars and passes through obstacles, gravitational lensing, dust clouds, etc., it loses energy and thus frequency eventually turning radiation from the gamma/x-ray spectrum into visible light then into infrared light. This new telescope will help us by giving us insights to some of the conditions that would be found very early on in the universe. Hubble and other similar land-based telescopes can't give us that insight because of not showing the infrared, the oldest information.
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
Can they actually do this in six years?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
..."JWST is named after James E Webb, Nasa Administrator during the Apollo lunar exploration era; he served from 1961 to 1968."
To add more evidence. Look, wikipedia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Edwin_Webb
To 1-up wikipedia. Look, NASA!
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/whois.html
The man whose name NASA has chosen to bestow upon the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is most commonly linked to the Apollo moon program, not to science. Yet, many believe that James E. Webb, who ran the fledgling space agency from February 1961 to October 1968, did more for science than perhaps any other government official and that it is only fitting that the Next Generation Space Telescope would be named after him.
Also wrong. Try this one.
There's enough of us around that remember the Hubble fiasco - they're going to have to do a LOT better this time.
When they start getting images from the JWST, they'll see a dude in a flowing white robe and beard waving his arms; lip readers will ultimately be able to make out the words "Let there be light!" in Hebrew.
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
I knew it was pretty big, but it wasn't until I saw a picture of the mockup with people next to it that I realized just how big it was. Suddenly you understand why it's a segmented mirror and lot's of folding pieces.
The captcha is spectrum...how fitting.
If the political will to feed the starving was here, we could do so and still put up the telescope. We spend the cost of the telescope a year on farm subsidies to prevent farmers from growing more crops. But the powers that be don't really give a shit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
FTA: - "Clearly we need a much bigger telescope to go back much further in time to see the very birth of the universe," said Edward Weiler, director of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre.
Now at the birth of the universe, the light started leaving at the speed of light, the matter somewhat slower. Without time-travel, or faster than light travel, no telescope can witness the big bang, or even events "relatively" soon afterwards.
If there was a big bang about 15 billion years ago, that light is now 15 billion light years in every direction from wherever the big bang happened, with all the matter (well) inside a sphere of that diameter. Good luck catching the light.
Yeah, fuck sustainable farming. We should over-farm the soil without ever leaving it fallow to recover. I mean, soil is soil right, it's not like overfarming would lead to a dustbowl or anything.
Its impossible for me to be reading on the World Wide Web about the James Webb space telescope to replace the Edwin Hubble 'scope without thinking about Webster Hubble from the Clinton years.
Is it mere coincidence that the Hubble 'scope was launched a few years before the Web was created, and here this guy named "Web Hubble" pops up in the public eye?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
is to screw-up so unbelievably badly, that it will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the problem. Let's hope they test the mirrors this time round.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Why does this need a sunshield at all? The article says that the telescope should be parked in the 2nd Lagrangian point L2, which is 1.5 Gm from the Earth and should be permanently shaded from sunlight. Isn't the whole point of sending something to L2 that it is not exposed to the sun? Also, how is the energy supply supposed to work? Anyone out there who can shed some light on these questions?
ignatius
Something I've always wondered... how do the R&D costs compare to construction, testing, and launch of a satellite, or in this case, a space telescope? Wouldn't R&D be the hard part here, making the marginal cost of each additional spacecraft relatively small in comparison to the upfront cost?
It's my understanding that there's a substantial waiting list to use Hubble, and that a lot of very good research can't get done because telescope time is so limited. Time on JWST will probably be similarly limited... if we've spent $3.5B on this thing so far, why not put an extra $250M into it and get twice the benefit?
Any experts care to weigh in?
...the telescope will be brought up by a Ariane-V Rocketa riane_5.jpg
from French Guyana.
http://www.uibk.ac.at/ipoint/news/images/esa_pic_
The telescope will orbit at a distance of 1.5m km - is that true? That puts it outside the orbit of the Moon does it not? About four times as far in fact? Wow, so this thing isn't designed to be serviced then. (wiki says Moon's apogee is 400,000km.
I'm sure I remember reading about how newer ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics were better than space telescopes and a fraction of the cost...
Yet here we are spending billions on servicing Hubble and launching $5 billion objects into space.
No sig today...
The last fancy telescope was named after an astrophysicist who made a significant contribution to our understanding of the universe, using the red shift to prove that the universe is indeed expanding, now commonly known as Hubble's law. The new telescope is named after an administrator. An important job, and done very well by the sounds of it, but it's not super-science. Am I the only one who sees the difference between running an agency and advancing the body of scientific knowledge? In 100 years time (heck, even today) who's name will we know?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Edwin_Webb
Here's a video of the orbit to help you understand:o w_l2orbit.mov2 orbit.mov
Low-res:
http://jwstsite.stsci.edu/gallery/tele_graphics/l
Hi-res:
http://jwstsite.stsci.edu/gallery/tele_graphics/l
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
hopefully, Hughes Danbury Optical Systems will not get the contract this time around.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Sweet... 18 feet of desktop wallpaper-enhancing power! It would be great if it had a self-repairing mirror with a few extra panels installed, in case of close encounter with space dust at 18,000 miles per hour.
stuff |
I'll avoid the tired old metric vs. american measurement arguments because (for once) this article referred to the telescope's distance from earth in metric from the start. But hey! Please can slashdot post articles with sensible SI prefixes in future?
The telescope's going to be appx. 1.5Gm from earth. Much easier to keep track of distances in the solar system using Gm and Tm. (The moon is appx 0.4Gm from earth, earth is appx. 150Gm from the sun, etc etc).
"Million Kilometres" is silly. No-one talks of "million kilobyte" hard-drives do they?
I thought hubble was extremely expensive and outperformed by a set of smaller and far cheaper telescops organized let's say on a circle each 30 degree (this is the idea) this way a better image (than with hubble) can be recomposed for less money.
does it matter?
I'm afraid this ones going to cost you...
There's call out, plus out of hours, plus overtime...
Though right now I'm afraid we just don't have the parts, we can order them in, but it'll cost extra...
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
This is not simply a NASA telescope. It is a partnership of NASA, ESA and the Canadian space agency. JWST should be an amazing instrument provided the mirrors fold out as promised...
It looks like James Webb was administor from 1961 to 1968, some very important years in spaceflight I'd say. The last moon walk was taken a year before I was born, so I don't have any direct experience with that era of space exploration. But I'm still amazed at how fast NASA moved from launching a satellite into orbit to putting men on the fricking moon and bringing them back safely. I wouldn't be surprised if this were in large part due to good leadership without which those accomplishments would have happened much slower and less successfully.
And if you want to name the telescope after a scientist, who are you going to choose? Many of the big names from centuries past are already taken: Galileo, Magellan, Ulysses. I don't know whether we've named any probes after Einstein or Newton, but they don't have all that much to do with JWST's mission. Are there other suitable scientists/explorers from the past? You can't really choose a living scientist -- for one thing modern science is produced much more by teams than by individual researchers. Maybe an administrator is an appropriate choice after all.
AlpineR
Or how about the fact that We just found a possible earth like planet. Hmmm repairing and serviceing the huble telescope doesn't seem to bad of an idea after all. Amazing how certain discoveries can energize a telescope program. (Sorry couldn't think of a better phrase.)
Well, the JWST hasn't really just been announced. I saw this model when I went to the SPIE conference several months ago. JWST itself has been in the planning stages for years. It was originally called NGST.
The war costs a little more than that: http://costofwar.com/
Thanks, I was going to post pretty much the same comment.
For the longest time I had the misconception that farmers were lazy bastards that got paid by the gov to sit on their asses. That was before I learned a few real facts about keeping soil healthy and able to actually grow food.
George W Bush, is that you?
Who modded this up? You, and parent, should both re-take astrophysics 101.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
I've known about this since last year, Brush Engineered Materials Inc. built the 18 hexagon mirrors on it plus whatever other beryllium that is in it
One of the things that made hubble so expensive was that it was designed to be serviced by astronauts in space suits. Designing it for access as well ha using only modules and components that can be changed while wearing bulky gloves drove up the price.
In the case of hubble it paid off because it was fixable when they found out that they polished the main mirror to the wrong shape. In general, though, a telescope not designed for maintenance can be more cost effective.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.