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World's Largest Space Telescope Is Complete, Expected To Launch In 2018 (space.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: After more than 20 years of construction, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is complete and, following in-depth testing, the largest-ever space telescope is expected to launch within two years, NASA officials announced today (Nov. 2). NASA Administrator Charles Bolden hosted a news conference to announce the milestone this morning at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, overlooking the 18 large mirrors that will collect infrared light, sheltered behind a tennis-court-size sun shield. JWST is considered the successor to NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope will be much more powerful than even Hubble for two main reasons, Mather said at the conference. First, it will be the biggest telescope mirror to fly in space. "You can see this beautiful, gold telescope is seven times the collecting area of the Hubble telescope," Mather said. And second, it is designed to collect infrared light, which Hubble is not very sensitive to. Earth's atmosphere glows in the infrared, so such measurements can't be made from the ground. Hubble emits its own heat, which would obscure infrared readings. JWST will run close to absolute zero in temperature and rest at a point in space called the Lagrange Point 2, which is directly behind Earth from the sun's perspective. That way, Earth can shield the telescope from the sun's infrared emission, and the sun shield can protect the telescope from both bodies' heat. The telescope's infrared view will pierce through obscuring cosmic dust to reveal the universe's first galaxies and spy on newly forming planetary systems. It also will be sensitive enough to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets that pass in front of their stars, perhaps to search for signs of life, Mather said. The telescope would be able to see a bumblebee a moon's distance away, he added -- both in reflected light and in the body heat the bee emitted. Its mirrors are so smooth that if you stretched the array to the size of the U.S., the hills and valleys of irregularity would be only a few inches high, Mather said.
You can see this beautiful, gold telescope is seven times the collecting area of the Hubble telescope
I guess we need to hope president Trump doesn't decide to melt it down to make a new white house toilet.
Did they double-check the mirror this time? And compensate for zero-G?
The testing is particularly high-stakes, because unlike Hubble, which was repaired and refocused in orbit by astronauts, this telescope is not intended to be repaired by humans.
Yikes. Isn't that sort of like announcing that your vehicle doesn't have seatbelts, so instead you're going to drive very, very carefully? Well, I guess that's not unusual for rocket science.
"Our lessons learned from the Hubble [telescope incident] were, if you really care about something, you've got to measure it at least twice," Mather added. "And if you don't get the same answer, you'd better figure out why."
Maybe they should have talked to a carpenter?
Ok, kidding aside... I really do hope it fares much better than Hubble's initial deployment. There's certainly a lot that can go wrong during development or deployment. But if all goes well, I'm looking forward to seeing what images are captured from the edge of the visible universe.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
AC, why are you posting on slashdot instead of solving the problems of world hunger or global warming? Hypocrite.
20 years? That's a long time for something that has been done before. Maybe they were extra careful as the website suggests but 20 years is a bit excessive.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
World hunger is a distribution problem. We have enough food for everyone. Unfortunately, our economic system is not able to solve this distribution problem. Maybe we should fix it. Unfortunately, we are not going to do so, as it is not in the interest of those who have.
20 years to make means it is too precious- just like buying one of those super expensive sport cars; can't drive it because can't risk an accident .
Please, don't let SpaceX launch it.
Or at least, don't let them fuel up the tanks. NASA had that down in the sixties, and SpaceX is still figuring that one out.
Is this the world's largest only because all the larger ones are already in orbit, and so technically outside of this world?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
"The telescope would be able to see a bumblebee a moon's distance away..."
So point it (or one of our much bigger ground based telescopes) at the moon.
Show us the junk left at the moon landing sites as thats clearly much bigger than an insect.
would have paid for the development of SpaceX's heavy lift rocket and several (cheaper and far heavier) single-piece mirror telescopes.
Suspect the JST will be obsolete within a decade.
you seem to think you can negoatie with trump. once he undoes NATO, wipes out the debt by canceling Social security and medicare, you might want to think about just how he will deport 12 million immigrants quickly. to house them he will have to build camps. once in camps they will be there for a couple of years to fly them all home(70% of immigrants fly here as they live overseas)camps like that are expensive to run $hundreds of dollars per day per person. So he will be a businessman and force them to work for cheap. probably making his cheap suits.
Hillary will be impeached in a year and kaine will be our president.
That I can live with, Trump I can not.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Im curious, how does the craft obtain power with its solar pannels? Being in the L2, it will be in earths shadow...
Hopefully they will not launch on SpaceX, I'd hate to have to wait another 20 years for the replacement.
The Atlas V and Delta IV are expensive but extremely reliable. Really they serve a different market from SpaceX, at least for now. SpaceX is good for easily replaceable mass produced commodity satellites where you can afford to lose a few and a backup can be available in months, while Delta/Atlas still best for extremely expensive one off satellites. The Delta IV was the only rocket we had that was tried and true and made of all american parts. While I want SpaceX to succeed, ULA eliminating the Delta IV seems to be a bit premature.
we've got rovers taking selfies on the red planet and imaging from the crashed ESA Mars lander taken by NASA's orbiter, and you're still considering the comparatively primitive hop to Luna something implausible? those pics already exist numbnuts. try searching for them.
Astronomers created wifi. Get off the internet please. And don't even think of using GPS or checking the weather report tomorrow. and do not watch that sports game on television. And don't get an xray, because astrotechnology might have been used to diagnose your xrays.
"The telescope would be able to see a bumblebee a moon's distance away..."
If only there were bumblebees in space.
#DarkMatterMatters
Give it to the army to use for target practice instead....
wonderful
geography and places
now there's an idea
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You Greens are now faced with a dilemma. To stop a space telescope, you will have to put on space suits and get into orbit, rather than just showing up in Hawaii and piling rocks on a road. Your dilemma is that doing so will go against everything you people stand for. As an ultimate humiliation, the Russians will probably insist on vaccinations before you get to go to their spaceport and ride in their vehicle.
Yeah, learning sucks! Fuck the elite learned fat-cats! When has science ever benefited society?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Well yeah, if you consider Anthony Weiner's impending tragic suicide - where he ties himself to a chair, then jumps out the 20th floor window, twice! - as "help"."
No, he will overdose on Viagra, causing his "brain" to explode on camera.
This seems like a lot money to spend to build a telescope to look for bumblebees on the moon. I'm pretty sure there are none.
Pretty sure Anthony Weiner is going to have an autoerotic asphyxiation session that goes tragically wrong.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"She will not start a war" - Well, she will almost certainly start a U.S. military campaign in Syria. I would also guess she starts at least as many wars, or military campaigns, as the Obama administration, so probably another couple or more, depends on how you count. I really hope one of those wars isn't against Russia, that could be quite unpleasant.
As for Trump - who knows what he's going to do? His rhetoric is full of bombast, bu it's also fickle and inconsistent. And if he draws on his experience as a businessperson, he might well prove less bellicose than a Clinton administration. If he somehow pulls out of NATO, that will be a positive development in my opinion, certainly for Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And think what could happen if he halts the "pivot to Asia" and the confrontational attitude towards China? ... Ok, I know that all that put together is not very likely - I don't think the US ruling class will actually allow anybody to have that kind of poiicy and he would be impeached or something - but still. I'm liking the odds of a Trump upset of Clinton.
PS - They're both horrible and the elections are a sham anyway.
There appears To Be a shift Key that Randomly Capitalizes words As you Type.
Yeah, because shooting it with rifles would definitely not be "wasting money" at all.
It's already built. The launch costs are insignificant in comparison to what has already been spent. Shoot it up there, and let's learn something, rather than yelling YEEEEEE HAWWWWW and emptying a magazine from a rifle into what might be the world's most precision optical instrumentation.
Just when I thought I've read the most moronic post possible, AC steps up again.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
According to the project member interviewed on the news.
The James Webb hasn't been launched yet. The site is Guiana but I'm uncertain if it has been delivered yet.
Gee, our sanitation system can't solve the problem either. Nor the hospital system.. Let's blame them.
It's a the political system within starving countries that is the problem, not the economic system here.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Wouldn't help. 5k+ year technology advantage. It was over before it started.
... will be that of a book floating in space.
It has the title:
"Postcards from the edge"
A far far better use of technological talent than sending nut cases to Mars.
of them, to account for the rather high probability of launch failure.
With an engineering project that long, 3 copies should have cost pretty close to the cost of one of them, since the whole project was probabl 90% labour costs.
I for one would be right pissed if my 20 years of work went kaboom because of a helium fuelling mishap.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"see a bumblebee a moon's distance away"
I of course welcome our moon measuring bumblebee overlords...
Seriously I guess we can get rid of LoC and other forms of measurement including football fields and metric in favor of measuring all lengths of things in terms of moon distances, and volume in terms of bumblebees.
Seems legit.
...Hunger is a Political Greed issue and Socialist use it to exploit the weak, elderly, and poor.
As compared to TRAP (The Rich and Powerful), who would never do that. The poor are screwed: news at 11.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
If the native population of North America had had a strict immigration policy, that would have saved them a lot of trouble...
I'm not sure why you are modded troll. This should be modded insightful, if not informative.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Do you really not know what an economic system is? Here is a hint from wikipedia "An economy (From Greek – "household" and o – "manage") is an area of the production, distribution, or trade, and consumption of goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location." Agents are people and organizations. The sole purpose of it is to support people with the necessities of live. If everyone would have already everything they need, there would be no need for an economy. Therefore, if there are people lacking stuff they need, then it is the fault of the economy. By our economic system, I meant the economic system on this planet not just the USA (which is just one country. There are others, you know). Yes economics get influenced by politics. As politics are there to make the rules, this is not that strange isn't it. In some areas of the globe politics is not working in favor of the people there. True, not every bad thing on the world is the fault of the US or the EU, but they are both big in supporting not so democratic regimes and pressure other countries. For example, the EU makes Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) which ease access to the African market. Too bad EU agricultural commodities are highly subsidized (just like in the US) and therefore the Africans cannot compete. So yes we are responsible for there problems, at least in parts. In case you need an US example, have a look at the corn price, the effects it has on Mexican society and how making fuel from corn hurt Mexicans. Or google food trading in general.
Hillary's emails. Or perhaps if used close up, her ethical sense.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Of my Olympus Mons-sized mountain of criticism i have for Obama, I absolutely applauded him - and still do - for pushing to keep funding the JWST to its completion. He could have been a dick, but he didn't do it. Good stuff. And here's a non-sarcastic THANKS OBAMA!
Earth-Sun L2 is the most sacred land of my people. You must not build there unless you give us a big bribe first.
SAme old tired saw since the 1950'sand 60's space programs, except then....we didnt know if it was really worth it in the long run. But now we do know, we know that the advancements in basic and applied sciences have been more than worth times 25 or 100 or 1000 even 10,0000 the cost of the actual mission. And the advancements to industry, medicine, and knowledge in general plus the spark lit in the imaginations of many young people of all social strata, has been truly one of the few things we can point to and say "it was worth it then, and it is worth it NOW". And we can do both things.