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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.
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
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.
Shuttle range wont really matter. They're retiring the fleet. I'm not sure if it will be in Ares I range or not, but it will surely be in Ares V range. The one thing I worry about on the whole Ares/Orin setup. The shuttle wasn't the best of designs for a lot of things, but one thing it was - it was a good work platform. Going back to capsules is great for a lot of reasons, but I do think an Ares V work platform module would be a good idea. Maybe even Ares I launchable fuel containers. I'll run that past the brain bunch, they shot down my whole Hubble as an ISS hood ornament idea really fast.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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!
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?
The most important aspect here might also be the fact that space expansion is a local event. On a large enough "distance", the speed of that event, if we just tried to add together the relative expansion per unit length, would exceed c. It can certainly approach it. There is/should be matter much farther away than the 2 * 15 bly "bubble" that would be the theoretical maximum of matter simply going in all directions at the point of Big Bang.
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 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
Ground based telescopes are good only for light that is not filtered by the atmosphere. There is a whole lot of spectrum outside it. The JWST targets the infra-red wavelengths, which would be much harder to do with an atmosphere above it
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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?
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
In addition to what the poster above me says about the atmosphere and spectrum of light, I'd like to point out...
$5 Billion dollars DOES seem like a lot. But look at the U.S. Budget in the last decade. Look at the money we've essentially THROWN AWAY. By comparison, $5 billion for an advancement of science seems rather reasonable, or at the very least, reasonable by comparison.
Because the moon orbits the Earth and therefore can't focus on a single point in space for long periods due to the Earth obscuring the view (a fault with the Hubble as well). The JWST can gather light from a single point, uninterrupted, for months if desired. There are other reasons as well, but this one alone is enough of a deal killer.
The average cost of each war the US engages in ends up being around $600 billion (after adjusting each one for inflation). We'll just have to complete the next war in 119/120ths of the time and the cost of the new telescope is covered :)
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black