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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.
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
ESA is going to launch it, seriously.
It's going up on an Ariane V launcher using a French-derived LOX/LH2 engine and Italian solid-rocket boosters with a lot of German sparkly bits to do the control.
Saying "the French" is like saying NASA = "Floridans".
ESA is going to pay for the launch, French company Arianespace will provide the rocket. Of course, Arianespace has lots of subcontractors all across Europe..
And the launch complex is on French soil.
That would be a good idea, given SpaceX still immature technology, if you could build the satellites for cheap and turn them out in a year or less, you can afford the higher failure rate of launches, since you could get another one up quickly should one fail.
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.
A rebuild to the same design would be much, much quicker. There are likely 'flight-spare' versions of most of the instruments sitting in clean rooms right now actually.
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JWST will launch on an Arianne V rocket. That is one of ESA's contributions to the program.
And even if it were to be launched on a "domestic" rocket, it is far, far too late in the program to launch on SpaceX. The choice of launcher gets decided very early on in a program, because the size of the rocket (payload capacity, payload fairing size, flight characteristics, etc.) has to be accounted for during the design of the telescope. By the time they are assembling the telescope, it would be very, very difficult and expensive to switch to a different launcher.
The very reason for the Ariane launch is probably the fact that the DH hasn't been sufficiently tested yet.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
I don't mind ESA launching it..... just as long as it doesn't have to land on Mars.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
We already have retroreflectors installed by the astronauts at their landing sites that you can bounce a laser of sufficient power off of.
The only people that don't think Apollo landed on the moon, are idiots that refuse to look at the overwhelming evidence, combined with the fact that no government project to fake something like that could have ever existed in secret for the last 45 years; and the "other team" in the Space Race would have loved to discredit the moon landings with any tracking data they undoubtedly had.
Honestly, it would be easier to just go to the moon than to fake it, even in 1969.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Also, ESA has put a few things at L2 already. Experience counts.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
I know many programs that have requirements to be compatible with several launchers.
That may be true for programs that support many launches (like NavStar = GPS). But one-of-a-kind spacecraft are typically designed for a specific launch vehicle. It's not just the adapter ring, but the fairing envelope and launch vibration loads. Designing for the worst case of all launch vehicles to be compatible with all of them, means the program has to accept serious design compromises. It also means additional cost to verify the design is compatible with all interfaces and complies with the worst case loads. That makes sense if you're doing cookie-cutter spacecraft vehicles, but not one-offs.
Im curious, how does the craft obtain power with its solar pannels? Being in the L2, it will be in earths shadow...
It is not in L2. It orbits it with a 250,000 mile radius orbit, and thus never gets close to the Earth's shadow.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
It is not in L2. It orbits it with a 250,000 mile radius orbit, and thus never gets close to the Earth's shadow.
So then the earth does not shield it from the sun's infrared emissions, contrary to what the summary says. Or am I missing something?
... will be that of a book floating in space.
It has the title:
"Postcards from the edge"
Never own a car 'too nice to drive' those belong in museums. If you own a car museum, you are the exception.
Fly this thing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
ESA does an OK job launching stuff. It's the landing part they seem to have some trouble with, and that's not an issue in this case.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Jitters
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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
Good luck launching a single piece mirror that big.
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.
You're correct, the summary is wrong. The sunshield is what shades the telescope from the Sun. It orbits L2 to keep it out of the Earth's shadow to prevent eclipses.
Yeah, because a Three Stooges film exactly replicates the necessary physics and detail of a moon landing hoax.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.