LET’S SEE WHAT’S OUT THERE
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest and most complex in history and expected to send images to Earth this week.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s revolutionary technology will study every phase of cosmic history — from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies of the early universe. Webb’s infrared telescope will explore a wide range of science questions to help us understand the origins of the universe.
Science targets:
First light and reionization. Earliest galaxies in the universe. How galaxies evolve.
Birth of stars and planets. Exoplanets.
Instruments: Near-infrared camera. Near-infrared spectrograph. Mid-infrared instrument. Near-infrared imager and slitless spectrograph with fine guidance sensor.
Webb is an international collaboration between NASA and its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Thousands of engineers and hundreds of scientists worked to make Webb a reality, along with more than 300 universities, organizations and companies from 29 U.S. states and 14 countries.
Development began in 1996 for a launch initially planned for 2007 with a $500 million budget. There were many delays and cost overruns, including a major redesign in 2005, a ripped sunshield during a practice deployment, recommendations from an independent review board, a threat by the U.S. Congress to cancel the project, the COVID-19 pandemic and problems with the telescope. Construction was completed in late 2016, followed by years of extensive testing before launch. The total project cost is expected to be about $9.7 billion.
Some Webb developments have had spinoff benefits. One example assists surgeons performing LASIK eye surgery: Engineers developed a technique for precisely and rapidly measuring the mirrors to guide their grinding and polishing.
This technology has since been adapted to creating high-definition maps of patients’ eyes for improved surgical precision.
The observatory has a temperature range from minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit on the inner layer to 260 degrees on the outer layer. It will operate at about minus-370 degrees.
Webb will peer back in time to when the universe was young — more than 13.5 billion years ago, a few hundred million years after the big bang theory — to search for the first galaxies in the universe.
Webb is so sensitive that it could theoretically detect the heat signature of a bumblebee at the distance of the moon.
Why Infrared?
Webb will study infrared light from celestial objects with much greater clarity and sensitivity than ever before.
Unlike the short, tight wavelengths of visible light, longer wavelengths of infrared light slip past dust more easily. Therefore, the universe of star and planet formation hidden behind clouds of dust comes into clear view for Webb’s infrared instruments.