James Webb Space Telescope finally set to launch on Christmas Day

Bretrick

Bretrick

Well-known Member
Location
Perth Western Australia
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the biggest, most powerful space telescope ever built.
With its massive gold-coated mirror, it promises to shine new light on the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago.
The telescope will also be able to detect atmospheres around alien planets in the Milky Way, and moons in our own solar system.
The telescope has four instruments — cameras and spectrographs — that can take images and detect energy in the infrared light spectrum.
At the heart of the telescope is a 6.5-metre gold-plated mirror made up of 18 segments.
Surrounding the mirror is a five-layer silver shield the size of a tennis court that will protect the telescope from the heat of the Sun.
The heat shield will keep the telescope super cold — minus 223 degrees Celsius, close to absolute zero — so it's able to observe objects in the infrared.

James Webb Space Telescope Deployment Sequence​

Animation: The James Webb Space Telescope's Orbit​

The James Webb Space Telescope Explained In 9 Minutes​

 

Watched it launch live at 4:20am PST on the Internet nasa.gov channel on my smartphone then continued for the 33 minutes through each phase till the solar arrays unfolded. IMO despite only lukewarm interest from national media, this is a immense event for the human world just one notch below the 1969 moon landing. Congratulations to the many in science contributing to its to this point success.
 
David777 said:
Watched it launch live at 4:20am PST on the Internet nasa.gov channel on my smartphone then continued for the 33 minutes through each phase till the solar arrays unfolded. IMO despite only lukewarm interest from national media, this is a immense event for the human world just one notch below the 1969 moon landing. Congratulations to the many in science contributing to its to this point success.
Click to expand...
Amazing achievement.
So looking forward to seeing what is found out there.
 
I sure hope this thing works, and has no problems. It will be so far away that any issues it might have/develop will Not be able to be fixed. If it works as intended, science will learn far more about the universe....perhaps even find other planets capable of supporting life.
 

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