After 25 years of hard work, it is finally ready. The piece of state-of-the-art technology is the life’s work of an entire generation of scientists who spent their time designing, building, assembling, and testing it. It is the work of their past and the key to ours. The James Webb Space Telescope is the single greatest technological achievement of NASA, an invention worthy of its predecessors in the Shuttle and Apollo programs. As the successor to the renowned Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb is a new telescope designed to look into the cosmos and see farther than ever before, uncovering the fundamental truth about the beginning of our universe: the Big Bang.
Development of the James Webb Space Telescope began in 1996, only 4 years after the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists knew the inherent limitations of Hubble, so they planned for Webb to be an infrared telescope to detect the earliest light in the universe. This created its own array of problems, all of which took the full 25 years to solve. To block the light of the Sun, Webb orbits the Sun at a stable orbit around a point known as Lagrange Point 2(L2), which protects it from most interfering radiation. Most other solar radiation is blocked by the extremely thin sunshield. The shield consists of 4 layers, each only a few hundred atoms thick. However, on the sun-facing side of the shield, you can boil water, while on the other side, you can freeze it. The telescope also has an internal cooling system to further cool the measuring device, which is so sensitive it can detect a single photon. The mirror is 6.5 meters in diameter and made of 18 hexagons of gold-plated beryllium, as beryllium is strong and lightweight while gold is a great reflector of infrared. The mirror was made to be foldable because it was too big to fit into the rocket! The sunshield is also foldable, and its opening procedure, which is entirely automated, has 300 single points of failure! Luckily, none of the parts failed, and Webb is working perfectly on its way to L2.
What will Webb be looking for in the universe? Simply put, Webb is looking where Hubble looked, but farther. As a telescope with an optical wavelength similar to the human eye, Hubble could not see through the numerous gas clouds dotting the night sky. However, Webb is powerful enough to see through these clouds, allowing us to see in high detail the remnants of the Big Bang, known to scientists as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. Webb will be able to see the first star formations, the first nebulas, the first clusters, the first solar systems, and the first planets, all in high detail. Webb is unique because it enables us to find out exactly how the universe evolved after the Big Bang. This truly will be the greatest discovery since the “God Particle*”. So what will happen? What will we see when James Webb points its eye to the heavens? What wonders are out there, waiting to be discovered? That’s for you to find out!
* The Higgs Boson is NOT the so-called “God Particle”. It has nothing to do with any possible proof for the existence of God in any way.
Comments
Post a Comment