#WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE HOW TO#
#WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE PATCH#

The project’s skyrocketing costs drew intense scrutiny from government auditors as well as perennial questions as to whether it would be worth its unprecedented price tag. NASA provided US$9.7 billion, including funds to cover operating costs in space €700 million (US$810 million) came from ESA and the CSA contributed Can$200 million (US$160 million). Webb’s overall cost was originally estimated at $1 billion - an appraisal few believed even then - and has since ballooned. Shading it will be a kite-shaped sunshield the size of a tennis court, made of five aluminium-coated layers that block the Sun’s heat and keep the telescope cool enough to operate. The mirror is so large that it must be folded up like origami during launch and unfurled once in space. What ultimately emerged were plans for a space telescope with a 6.5-metre-wide primary mirror, nearly three times the size of Hubble’s, and made up of 18 hexagonal segments.

#WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE HOW TO#

It was the year before the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and scientists were already thinking about how to follow up that transformative observatory. The first glimmers of what would become Webb arose at a workshop at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1989. “There are a lot of emotions.” Decades of development “There aren’t many times in your life when you’re on the cusp of such a big thing,” says Heidi Hammel, an astronomer and vice-president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington DC, who has worked on Webb for decades. When the telescope lifts off after so many delays and so much debate, it will carry with it the hopes of thousands of astronomers around the world. Webb also held a high-ranking position in the US Department of State in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at a time when that department was systematically rooting out and firing gay and lesbian people because of their sexual orientation. Just this year, the telescope has been enveloped in controversy over whether it ought to remain named after James Webb, who headed NASA in the 1960s when a NASA employee was fired on suspicion of being gay.

The telescope took decades and more than US$10 billion to develop, and frequent delays repeatedly ate into NASA’s astrophysics budget. “Webb has such transformative capabilities that - to me - it’s going to be the ‘before’ times and the ‘after’ times,” says Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who serves as Webb’s operations project scientist.īut if anything goes wrong, it will be an ignominious setback to what is already the most expensive astronomical gamble in history. Ryan (UC Davis), Haojing Yan (OSU), Anton M. Rutkowski (ASU), Robert O'Connell (UVA), P. Credit: NASA, ESA, Rogier Windhorst (ASU), S.

#WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE PATCH#

The Webb telescope will spend hundreds of hours surveying this patch of sky, seen here in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope that captures 7,500 galaxies, some more than 13 billion years old. Roughly 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has transformed our understanding of the cosmos over the past 31 years, Webb will reveal previously hidden aspects of the Universe. If everything goes to plan, Webb will remake astronomy by peering at cosmic phenomena such as the most distant galaxies ever seen, the atmospheres of far-off planets and the hearts of star-forming regions swaddled in dust. The long-awaited Webb - a partnership involving NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) - is slated to lift off from a launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, no earlier than 22 December.

She is one of dozens of astronomers who learnt in March that they had won observing time on the telescope. Called K2-141b, it is a world so hot that its surface is partly molten rock. Now, three decades later, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is finally about to launch, and Dang has scored some of its first observing time - in a research area that didn’t even exist when it was being designed.ĭang, an astrophysicist and graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, will be using the telescope, known as Webb for short, to stare at a planet beyond the Solar System. Lisa Dang wasn’t even born when astronomers started planning the most ambitious and complex space observatory ever built.

Webb space telescope