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.

Comments

Re:Check the Focus!

[vtcodger]

Quite a lot of speculative fiction in this thread. In point of fact the US (and Russia and ... probably others) had extensive experience with big telescopes in space pointed at the Earth by the time Hubble was launched. Heck Google maps satellite view can resolve cars in our driveway an a barbeque on our deck. It's a safe bet that the intelligence folk, now and then, could/can do better. Most likely lots better

(BTW, my understanding is that you need very complex adaptive optics to get clear views of small stuff on the surface from space. The optics correct for minor atmospheric issues. Same issues that make stars appear to twinkle.)

I didn't work on Hubble's optics (no one in their right mind would put me to work on optics) and it's not unlikely that I wouldn't be able to talk about exactly what went wrong even if I knew because of the probable overlap with highly classified stuff that is probably still classified. But I suspect it was probably a simple screwup. If you're interested in the official story -- which surely could be true -- see http://www.cio.com.au/article/... (Bottom line; a small procedural error during calibration resulted in the optical elements in Hubble being ever so slightly misaligned.)

Here's a link to two decade old intelligence photos leaked in 1997. http://fas.org/irp/imint/kh-12...

BTW since no one else is likely to mention it, the Webb observatory is about a decade late and 400% or so over budget. Moreover, it's not clear that its imaging in the visual spectrum will be much if any better than the big ground based telescopes like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... scheduled for about a decade from now. If nothing else the EELT is likely to be a good deal easier to tweak/repair/improve than a telescope meandering around hundreds of thousands of km from earth.

(The IR portion of the Webb device is clearly worthwhile although one might question if it is eight billion dollars worth of worthwhile).

I apologize for being grumpy. But I'm kind of tired of listening to hype, fiction and misrepresentation, and of folks continuing to buy into it.

I appear to be surrounded by slow learners.