The birth of a new space telescope will take a long time and a lot of money and inspiration. Astronauts first began testing NASA for the Hubble Space Telescope fan even before that telescope was launched into orbit in 1990. Back then they thought it could be less than a billion spent and completed in the first decade of the 21st century.
Thirty years, $ 8.8 billion, misfortune and budget crisis and the collapse of a coalition threatened later, the James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready. NASA plans to launch it into orbit as early as October 31 aboard a Ariane 5 rocket provided by the European Space Agency, from a site in French Guiana.
At a recent meeting of the Astronomical Society of America, technologists and engineers showed the telescope what they hoped would be the last time for humans on earth. “The next time the observatory looks like this,” said Eric Smith of NASA, a scientist for the telescope, “it will be longer than the moon and will appear to us as a point source about the size of 17 ”.
Assembled in his clean room at Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles, the telescope, as seen over a meaningful “town hall” meeting at the conference, was like a giant sunflower riding on it. surf board. The flower petals of 18 gold-plated beryllium hexagons are attached to form a basin more than 20 feet across. The surfboard, on which he sails forever on the other side of the moon, is a five-layer plastic sandwich called Kapton that shields the telescope from the sun.
The telescope, named for the controller that guided NASA through the Apollo program, is almost three times larger than the vaunted Hubble and seven times more powerful than its ability to detect thin stars and galaxies at the edges of time.
The New York Times
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