NASA golden surfer, Webb Telescope, almost ready

Birthing a new space telescope takes a long time and a lot of money and inspiration. Astronomers first began pestering NASA for the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope even before that telescope was launched into orbit in 1990. Back then they thought it could cost less than a billion and be ready in the first decade of the 21st century.

Thirty years, $8.8 billion, multiple mishaps and budget crises and a threatened congressional cancellation later, the James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready. NASA plans to launch it into orbit as early as October 31 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket supplied by the European Space Agency, from a site in French Guiana.

During a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, technicians and engineers showed off the telescope for what they hoped would be the last time to humans on the ground. “The next time the observatory looks like this,” said NASA’S Eric Smith, a scientist for the telescope, “it will be beyond the moon and appear to us as a roughly 17th-magnitude point source”.

Assembled in its clean room at Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles, the telescope, as viewed over a virtual “town hall” meeting during the conference, resembled a giant sunflower riding on a surfboard. The flower’s petals are 18 goldplated beryllium hexagons joined to form a dish more than 20 feet across. The surfboard, on which it will float eternally on the far side of the moon, is a sandwich of five layers of a plastic called Kapton that will shield the telescope from the sun.

The telescope, named for the administrator who led NASA through the Apollo programme, is almost three times larger than the vaunted Hubble and seven times more powerful in its ability to discern faint stars and galaxies at the edges of time.