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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.
ANY TING YOU WANT!
We would be better off solving world hunger or figuring out how to stop global warming. None of this will ever truly benefit humankind. The desire to throw away money on projects like this because we can is the same reason that people are voting for a buffoon like Donald Trump instead of voting for Hillary Clinton, who will actually help people. Let's not launch this telescope and, instead, dedicate our resources to truly helping humanity.
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.
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!
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.
Easy to pass judgement while sitting pretty in your country... a country no doubt much more homogeneous than the USA is.
Open borders for Israel.
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.
"The telescope would be able to see a bumblebee a moon's distance away..."
If only there were bumblebees in space.
fear tHe reaper a dead man walking. The failure of
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.
shitheads. *BSD IS DYING LIKE THE teeth into when person. Ask your do and doing what users all over the time I'm done here, Distro is done Here bleak future.% In
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.
... 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.
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.