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The Future of Astronomy: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope
An anonymous reader writes: In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and deployed, becoming the first space-based observatory. In the years since, many others have followed, covering the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but with nothing superseding Hubble over the wavelengths it covers. That will all change with the James Webb Space Telescope, currently on schedule and almost ready for its October 2018 launch date. The science instruments are all complete, the final mirrors are being inserted into the optical assembly, the sunshield (a new, innovative component) is almost complete, and then it just needs assembly and launch. When it's all said and done, JWST will be orders of magnitude greater than all the other observatories that came before, and will finally allow us to truly see the first stars, galaxies and quasars in the Universe, not limited by the obscuring neutral gas that currently blocks our view with other observatories.
The Hubble Space Telescope was great looking outside the galaxy, but galactic dust blocks our view of our own galaxy. It will be great to finally be able to peer through the dust and see the structure of the Milky Way.
Don't click the link. It's forbes. it won't work uunless you disable adblock, and if you do it'll install malware.
(It's Ethan, the goatblower with the shaved head and the beard, if you hadn't guessed)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Ethan, you can't fool us anymore. We know you submitted this. DON'T VISIT THE LINK. His blog is full of malware ads and they require you to remove your adblocker. You have been warned!
The Future of Astronomy: More shit from NASA that explodes!
Why would you post a link to Forbes? It gives me some crap about disabling my ad-blocker (yeah, right) and not letting me see the content unless I do so. As far as I'm concerned it is the same as paywalled. Either find another source or don't post it. Oh, right, it's Timmy.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Will this satellite need 'glasses' too? https://news.google.com/newspa...
"In the years since, many others have followed, covering the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but with nothing superseding Hubble over the wavelengths it covers. That will all change with the James Webb Space Telescope, currently on schedule and almost ready for its October 2018 launch date."
This is not entirely accurate. JWST is primarily infrared- it won't cover the full visible spectrum. Hubble will still be required to see anything below yellow/green wavelengths, including blue down through ultraviolet, where JWST can't see at all. It will certainly let us see farther, and through the dust, but it's not the be all end all of space telescopes.
Did anyone think to point this thing at something on the ground and check the focus?
Because they didn't think to do that for the Hubble.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The Future of Astronomy: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope
You know what they say: The James Webb Space Telescope is the future of astronomy, and it always will be.
The next news: "Hawaiian natives block the James Webb telescope because it desecrates the heavens".
Alright, for all you Pedants out there...
"Check that the mistake made with the Hubble wasn't made with this one"
Better?
Now get a Margarita or something.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
When I first saw an illustration of this thing, I thought, "WTF: it's a satellite dish on raft; those rocket scientists are projecting their vacation dreams". A lot of things have to go right in its deployment.
I wonder what happens if something goes wrong such as a jammed deployment? It's not in low-Earth-orbit like Hubble is, but further than even Apollo went.
Would they give up on it under that scenario? Scramble-rush the launch of a fix-it bot? They should start the planning now, because there's probably at least a 10% chance of deployment issues.
It would be a good test run of post-moon manned missions, but it would probably take too long to prepare such. A fix-it bot is probably more viable.
Table-ized A.I.
No. How would they have built this without the experience from Hubble and its failures? This is a much more expensive and complex telescope, but it built on experience earned in the previous scopes.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I guess you could call it on schedule at the moment since they've slipped at least nine times since the project was announced in 1997. According to the initial schedule it should already have been in orbit almost nine years!
I guess that's "on schedule" for NASA.
This will.
There's only one article I'm interested in: How much is StartsWithABang paying Dice to constantly post every one of his damn blogs? We've got 2 in one day now. Is this a subscription service, or do you pay by the submission? Does it cost extra to hide the poster as an Anonymous Coward? Is the cost proportional to the amount of hate they get?
I was promised that it's vitally important for people to *be* in space! Because I grew up on stuff like this:
http://www.ephemerasociety.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/CCCPNewYear5-150-590x275.jpg
But I guess putting a fully automated camera in orbit while we sit in our office chairs is the realistic way of doing it.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., http://www.britannica.com/topi...
Just incase it hasn't been done formally.
Ethan Siegel, please stop spamming slashdot for your personal gain, to the detriment of the community.
You constantly rehash old stories and pass them off as your own or novel. Every day.
Please stop posting that stuff here.
Will this go up on one of the up and coming space delivery vehicles, or another exploding rocket? What are the historical rocket failure rates vs cost of the payload anyway?
For all it's worth - and I'm sure it will be a great telescope - one can not also look at the downside of it. It has been exorbitantly expensive. Originally estimated at 1 billion, and 5 years development, it will now clock at 8,8 billion (more than 8 TIMES as much, thus!) and 11 years later...
For sure, I do not agree with those who say to just scrap it, since it gobbles up all the money that other space-science projects could use - at least at this point. It has come this far, and we'd poured so much money in it already, and it's now actually close to be finished, it would be foolhardy to shut it down now. We needed to do that years and billions of dollars ago. Now it's too late, and it would mean wasting all that money and time for nothing.
No, then we'd better get everything out of it that we can, costly as it may have been. No use stopping and returning if you're finally at the finishing line.
That said, one has to acknowledge it has been mismanaged to an awful degree, and cost-overruns were rampant, and no sensible control was exercised on it (or at least, they didn't had the balls to pull out the plug when it became apparent it would cost 50% more than expected, in which case, imho, ALL projects should be cut. Because if you're already at 50% overrun and you still have next to nothing built, it's bound to 'overrun' much, much more. But apart from it being far too costly, there is also the problem it took so much time as to have been outdated by now.
Technology didn't stand still. These days, one could achieve the same lightgathering power with creating three much cheaper and easier to build 2-meter mirrors as space-telescopes and use optical interferometry. And it would have a ten time BETTER resolution, or even more, depending how much the mirrors are apart while remaining stable and data-connected with a laser. And that for about a quarter as the price of the JWT.
In fact, for 8,8 billion, you could make something that would be 5 times bigger than the overwhelmingly large telescope ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) of the EU (which has been cancelled due to it being considered too costly), on Earth. That would given you a FAR more powerful Telescope than what you have now, with only very minor drawbacks in comparison to the JWT.
All in all, thus, it has been a bad decision to keep the project alive with all the time and money-overruns. But now that it's finally finished...well, I hope it turns out to be a worthwhile machine, and a telescope that will brings uw many amazing things. There is no sense in crying over spilled milk, after all.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
You know, the logic behind your post sounds vaguely familiar.
I wonder if Hanlon's Razor is fundamentally wrong. Incompetence is the new malice.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What?
"but with nothing superseding Hubble over the wavelengths it covers. That will all change with the James Webb Space Telescope"
JWST is an infrared telescope, it is not a Hubble replacement. Hubble is a bit of everything covering near-infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet.
JWST being IR will allow us to see through dust clouds, and further back in time due to light being red shifted from more distant objects.
From 0 Hz to 6.2e34 Hz?
Somehow, I doubt that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yep, just like the world has pissed away TRILLIONS of dollars on all the lame, underpowered PCs made before 2000 or so, even though a cheap machine today is orders of magnitude faster. What a waste!
can someone explain how that works? is only 15% of the surface usable??
Yep. His post is pretty much a sunk cost fallacy. Which is perfectly sound logic for a business but not for science - and the reason why we need public funded science orgs like NASA where the budget is not the sole motivation.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And that's assuming it holds its launch date. That's not likely. It doesn't need to rendezvous with a planet, so the launch date is fairly non-critical.
Tell me it's "almost ready" when they're packing it up for shipping to the launch site. They haven't even finished assembling it and doing the environmental tests.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
According to slippage history in Wikipeadia, But it seems to have held a 2018 date since 2011. Cossing fingers.
I'm not sure if you understood my post. It's meant to be a taken as indicating it has cost TOO much, and the money would well have been spend much better. If you're not agreeing to that, give arguments, not just some non-sequitur snapshot remarks and links that have nothing to do with the issue.
If, however, you are specifically taking out one element of my post, namely that I argue that one should have pulled the plug out long ago, and that now it's not a good idea anymore - feel free to argument why this would be untrue in this *de facto* specific example. Do note, that, while in the begin-years the costs overruns were gigantic (the time where one SHOULD have pulled the plug), this is not the case for these last few years anymore. Moreover, by now it's largely build. *Whatever* you would spare and recuperate money from it starting today - if you should shut it down now - the total amount 'saved' that way would NOT get you as much scientific worth as what the JWT would give. It's a fully rational reasoning if you take a pragmatic stance, and not some idealistic purist one. One should have done it in the year 2000, then, when there was an 80% increase of the cost in one year time. Now that it's already build for more than 90%, even if further overruns would occur, they won't be drastic - which is shown in the cost-estimates of the last few years, btw. for the few hundred millions you would save that way, you couldn't make another telescope - even when cheaper build - of the same capabilities with that money.
The main point however, was that there should be more control on cost-overruns of such projects, and pull the plug much more early. I don't see how anyone would NOT agree to that. Then one wouldn't encounter things like this, where one would argue to scrap an almost finished product and thus basically waste all what was put in already. Doing such a thing makes only sense if the benefits outweighs the cost *at that time* (aka, when you are debating to scrap it or not).
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I'm not sure if you understood my post. It's meant to be a taken as indicating it has cost TOO much, and the money would well have been spend much better. If you're not agreeing to that, give arguments, not just some non-sequitur snapshot remarks and links that have nothing to do with the issue.
If, however, you are specifically taking out one element of my post, namely that I argue that one should have pulled the plug out long ago, and that now it's not a good idea anymore - feel free to argument why this would be untrue in this *de facto* specific example. Do note, that, while in the begin-years the costs overruns were gigantic (the time where one SHOULD have pulled the plug), this is not the case for these last few years anymore. Moreover, by now it's largely build. *Whatever* you would spare and recuperate money from it starting today - if you should shut it down now - the total amount 'saved' that way would NOT get you as much scientific worth as what the JWT would give. It's a fully rational reasoning if you take a pragmatic stance, and not some idealistic purist one. One should have done it in the year 2000, then, when there was an 80% increase of the cost in one year time. Now that it's already build for more than 90%, even if further overruns would occur, they won't be drastic - which is shown in the cost-estimates of the last few years, btw. for the few hundred millions you would save that way, you couldn't make another telescope - even when cheaper build - of the same capabilities with that money.
The main point however, was that there should be more control on cost-overruns of such projects, and pull the plug much more early. I don't see how anyone would NOT agree to that. Then one wouldn't encounter things like this, where one would argue to scrap an almost finished product and thus basically waste all what was put in already. Doing such a thing makes only sense if the benefits outweighs the cost *at that time* (aka, when you are debating to scrap it or not)...
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
The argument that "we've spent too much not to finish now" is a sunk cost fallacy - it's a common thinking error that is generally terrible business. My argument was that it being terrible business is irrelevant, because the purpose of the excercise is not to make a profit - so the budget is not the primary concern, and that this is actually why public scientific organisations like NASA are so important.
Somebody has to do the science where we can't see any application - because much of that science ends up driving revolutionary technologies decades later which nobody could foresee when it was being done.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
However, it's reasonable to ask oneself what the best bang for the bucks is. While the purpose might not be making a profit, budgets are never infinite, thus one can not deny cost IS important. The bang, in this case, is indeed not profit, but it is scientific return. But the same principle remains: couldn't one have gotten more scientific value out of the 8,8 billion that one poured into it? Since a lot is due to mismanagement, one can reasonably argue a lot of the budget was wasted. And whether that is a 'primary' concern or not, it still is a concern, exactly because the budget IS limited. A dime can not be spend two times, and what goes one way, isn't available for something else.
That said, my argument is not 'we spend so much on it, so we must finish it', but rather "we spend so much on it, it's now nearly finished, and the money one would save by stopping it today would be peanuts, and wouldn't compensate the loss of scientific value of scrapping it now."
I think this is the most logical rationale. It's all good and well to say science drives revolutionary technologies, but that doesn't mean one still can't spend it better, on more science, even in the domain of science where 'one can't see any application'. On the other hand, at some point, the cost/benefit has a turning point. I would say it exceeds it when only half the project is done and yet one is already half over ones' budget. At the other hand, when 90% is finished, and no great cost-overruns will occur anymore, *at that point* it makes sense to finish it, because, then, *that* is where one gets the most (scientific) bang for the bucks, since the sunken cost of it has already happened, and thus the total amount of money wasted is already there, it means one has to look at the possible savings in regard to the science one will get from it being allowed, or it being scrapped and something else started with the money saved.
This is a purely pragmatic stance. Each project, like that for the F-35, would need to be judged on those merits. But the real problem is letting it go on far too long with cost-overruns, not letting it go on when it's almost finished when the cost-overruns already happened.
And look, I'm all for science. But if they had stopped it when the estimate went from 1 billion to 1,8 billion in one year time, we'd saved 7,8 billion dollar. With that money, you could make far cheaper (2 or 3) space-telescope(s) of 2 meter diameter, and use interferometry to achieve the same (and actually a lot more) science than one can with the JWST, and still have enough left for other science too.
So I think you're in error, here. The 'profit' here is science, but the value-for-money principle still holds up. And it always will, unless you have unlimited budgets - which isn't the case of NASA.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
While there is some worth to that reasoning the problem is that we have no idea what the value of lost science may turn out to be. When Einstein wrote that obscure paper in 1929 he didn't win a nobel prize for it, it drew very little attention. Compared to relativity it was not exactly his best work... but the equation in that paper gave us the laser. How much technology has that made possible ? How many lives has that technology saved ? How much better to get lifesaving surgery from a modern laser scalpil and have a tiny scar with greatly reduced risk than to the old way ? Nobody predicted that in 1929 - nobody had any idea what that little paper would actually mean. It's paid for whatever it cost to get that done a million times over.
The one thing worth considering is that in some way none of us can begin to fathom one picture from this telescope may unlock something our grandchildren will make trillions out of. So we spent 8 billion. We planned to spend 1. That sucks - and it's definitely worth asking "how can we be better at estimating costs so we can plan our budget more efficiently" - but it's worth remembering that even the worst cost overruns are quite possibly only a tiny, tiny fraction of the profits it will lead to.
NASA itself provides another perfect example. Back in the 1950s NASA was struggling with the fact that fuel pumps don't work very well in zero-G. They ultimately went with simply highly-pressurized fuel containers, which works and their simplicity made up for the increased risk - but along the way they experimented with a whole lot of designs. One of those designs was to mix magnetic nano-particles in with the fuel - which would give you a fuel you could pump with electro-magnets. They never did use that fuel - but the process for making ferofluid has revolutionized dozens of industries and is currently the key to not one but three seperate forms of targetted cancer treatments as well numerous other medical procedures (it's amazing what you can do when you inject a liquid magnet into some cells before doing an MRI). We don't know, of course, if that tech will pan out - it wasn't ready in time to save my friend but she was given 18 months and experimental targetted treatments kept her alive for nearly 5 years with a decent quality of life (we went to a metallica concert just 3 months before she died) - that was simply impossible even 10 years ago.
Imagine were we could stand with better targetted treatments that can be non-surgiically directed exactly where you need them in another 5 years ? We will never cure cancer because "cancer" is not a diseases, it's a collective noun for dozens of diseases with different causes which just happen to have one aspect of their symptoms in common, but, in time we can probably cure every one of those diseases individually. We're making huge strides towards that with gene therapy and other targetted treatments (some of them surprisingly mechanical).
Most of what we know about quantum mechanics and how particles behave we first started suspecting after studying the heavens, much of what we learned from studying particles have changed our ideas about space. What we see in that telescope, could be the observation that gives us a unified theory of physics, or we could see a reaction happening in another galaxy that future chemical engineers will replicate to create the material that builds the technologies of the 22nd century. We simply don't know and we can't know - because the information needed to make those inventions don't exist yet. Invention always comes after discovery - often long after - and discovery usually appears to be monetarily worthless - if you forget that without it no invention can happen at all.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yes, I know what you're argumenting. But, on itself, that has little to do with wasting money on overhead and mismanagement. The problem with what you say is, that, even when taken at face value, it's indeterminable *in any case*. So, while it might be true, it has no argumentative value (in determining the best course of action).
Let me make this clear: you basically say, well, the 8 billion might be worth it, since you never know what you will get out off it. Very well, but for 2 billion you could have made a set of smaller mirrors and used interferometry, and you ALSO could not predict what you would get out of it. Seen the potential, one might even assume *more* (foreseen) science would come out of it, as for the unforeseen...well, since it can't be determined in front, anything is as good as the next.
So, even in that case, it *still* makes more sense to go for what you may reasonably assume will give you the most 'foreseen' science, and as for the unforeseen benefits: well, everything has as much chance, since you can't predict it.
This is still the most reasonable thing to do, thus, otherwise one could spend the whole budget of NASA into something like the EMdrive, and simply hope for the one-in-a-trillion chance that something useful will come of it. I...think we can do better and spend it a bit more rationally...
Thus, even when one would take what you say at face value, it's still no way to conduct science (or at least, spend a budget on it) in the best way. Scientific projects are primarily done for the predicted and foreseen scientific benefits it will bring - this is the case even for non-commercial, academic science - and all the rest is a bonus. A bonus you can never be sure of anyhow, so it's not like wasting more money on a certain project will give you any more certainty of getting anything worthwhile in the far future we can not predict today.
So saying one can not fathom what that telescope might bring, might be true, but you also can't fathom what 1)a set of telescopes with interferometry + 2)an overwhelmingly large telescope on earth, + 3) two to three other projects could have brought, for the same money. It's still no reason to put up with overruns and just keep pouring money into it, in the off-chance it could maybe be beneficial in the future in ways we don't know. It might. so might everything else one could have done with the same amount of money. So it isn't an argument on itself in defence of spending so much money.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---