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John Mather On the Building of the James Webb Space Telescope
Nancy Atkinson writes "Why is the James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled to launch in 2013) taking so long to build? Hasn't it had a huge cost over-run and several delays? Nobel Prize winner John Mather is the Project Scientist for JWST, and he addresses these questions and more in an in-depth interview, one of the few he's given about this next-generation telescope and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Quoting: 'The hardest thing to build was the mirror, because we needed something that is way bigger than Hubble. But you can't possibly lift something that big or fit it into a rocket, so you need something that is lighter weight but nonetheless larger, so it has to have the ability to fold up. The mirror is made of light-weight beryllium, and has 18 hexagonal segments. The telescope folds up like a butterfly in its chrysalis and will have to completely undo itself. It's a rather elaborate process that will take many hours. The telescope is huge, at 6.5 meters (21 feet), so it's pretty impressive.'"
So, when the JWST was designed Orion (and the launch vehicles Ares I and Ares V) weren't on the drawing boards.
Does anyone know if Orion will be able to service it? Since it's being designed for flights to the moon, L2 isn't that much further away is it? So the amount of supplies it needs to carry shouldn't be a problem and the reentry capsule should be able to handle the 25,000 mph return. However would the mission be too dangerous in terms of radiation exposure?
Have provisions been made on the JWST since to allow for removal/change of the instruments/gyroscopes like Hubble? What about docking ports or grappling interfaces?
I recall that India, China and Japan have ongoing lunar orbiter missions right now, Japan having an HD feed to earth, I've heard there is a real-time satellite channel that retransmits that feed to any household that tunes to that channel. I can't say much for Russia, I don't recall much from them. Russia gets a lot of money from oil and gas, and the prices aren't what they were in the past couple years.
Hubble may have been a bit too successful, Hubble images have entered mainstream culture in a way few other big science projects have, that is going to be hard to follow. Webb may be a little more obscure given that it's infrared and peering deeper into space, but we'll see.
I'm disappointed in the James Webb telescope because:
a) it will be shooting in infrared and that means no visible light details of the planets in our solar system, no pictures of asteroids. Yes, it will help us see stuff billions of light years away, and that's interesting, but what's going on in our solar system is pretty relevant. The easiest way to fix that, of course, is to build a solar system space telescope. Compared to bailing out a bank, I'd much rather have another space telescope.
b) it's named after a bureaucrat, not a scientist. To me, the JWS is right up there with the USS Carl Vinson, John Stennis, and any of the US warships named after presidents. It's just pathetic and sends all the wrong messages.
For christ sakes, if we are going to name it after anybody. I would even prefer naming it after a golden era sci fi writer - Bradbury, Asimov...
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