There’s a lot to be done on the $ 10 billion James Webb Space Telescope launch

NASA’s $ 10 billion launch James Webb Space Telescope of French Guiana could mark a triumph in a tale that thousands of astronomers have followed for a generation. Or it could lead to the deepest tragedy.

Either way, the climax is set to be starting on Christmas morning, making it a holiday movie-worthy storyline.

“I waited 23 years for the launch of this telescope”, astronomer from the University of Washington Eric Agol GeekWire says.

Agol waited so long that the focus of his research completely changed during the wait. In 1998, when the Next Generation Space Telescope was still on the drawing boards, studying gravitational lens quasars.

“I was doing science at the time with ground telescopes and, in particular, the Keck telescope in Hawaii,” Agol said. “We spent half a night looking at distant quasars, and then we calculated that with the James Webb Space Telescope, it would take a few milliseconds to make the same observation.”

Now he’s studying planets beyond our own solar system – with an intense focus on TRAPPIST-1, a potentially habitable planetary system 39 light years from Earth. This is a testament to the telescope’s versatility which promises to have an equally dramatic effect on this project.

“James Webb is just going to give phenomenal data on this system of transiting planets,” Agol said. “Each of the transits will provide spectral information if there are any signs of atmospheres on these planets. This is the first time that we have a very good chance of probing the atmospheres on potentially Earth-like planets.”

But first, the telescope must settle at its location in deep space, a million kilometers from Earth, at a point of gravitational equilibrium known as Sun-Earth L2.

The Christmas launch is the first step: as part of an agreement between NASA and the European Space Agency, JWST will take off from ESA’s spaceport in French Guiana on top of a European Ariane 5 rocket. A series of postponements due to technical and weather issues, the launch is scheduled for no earlier than 9:20 a.m. local time (4:20 a.m. PT) on December 25 – complicating vacation plans for astronomers around the world.

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“They have to, for example, schedule their children’s pancakes and gifts to give their children a great Christmas, but they also have to watch James Webb unfold,” UW astronomer Emilie Lévesque noted.

NASA must begin its streaming coverage at 3 a.m. PT on Christmas morning.

Unprecedented risks

This launch is no joke: it comes after years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns. (When I wrote about JWST in 2007, the cost of what is now a $ 10 billion observatory has been estimated at $ 3.5 billion, with a launch slated for 2013.)

Due to the telescope’s destination, it cannot be serviced by an astronaut crew after launch. It’s different from the Hubble Space Telescope – which was supposed to undergo a major repair by a space shuttle crew three years after his deployment, due to a flaw in his mirror.

Frequently Asked Questions: NASA Quick Look at the James Webb Space Telescope

Because JWST’s rearview mirror is so wide – 6.5 meters, or 21.3 feet – it has to be folded origami-style to fit inside Ariadne 5’s fairing. This means that the mirror and the multi-layered screen that protects the telescope’s delicate instruments from the glare of the sun must unfold after launch. The spacecraft can be reprogrammed in flight if something is wrong with the software, but if JWST encounters a hardware issue, there is a chance that the entire mission will be lost.

“If anyone can do it, NASA can do it,” Levesque said. “It’s an incredibly complicated launch and deployment. There are so many steps that have to go perfectly. They also spent years trying to make everything as perfect as possible. I think I’m going to bite my nails with everyone, and nothing about a space launch or a mission of this complexity is routine, but if anyone can make it work, it’s The NASA.

The drama must unfold, so to speak, over several weeks. The last date Levesque has marked on his calendar for concern is late January, when JWST is expected to arrive at point L2.

Since the gravitational forces of the Earth and the Sun are aligned at this point, the spacecraft will require minimal thruster fire to stay in a stable location in Earth’s shadow. But it will take a few more months for the telescope to be put into service for the first large-scale scientific operations.

Unprecedented returns

For more than a decade, NASA touted the James Webb Space Telescope as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which successfully last more than 30 years.

Like Hubble, JWST’s instruments are designed to make discoveries across the spectrum of astronomy – ranging from the worlds and mini-worlds of our own solar system to alien planets encircling distant stars, from supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy to the edge of the observable universe.

The 18-segment mirror of the Webb telescope has almost seven times the light collecting capacity of the Hubble mirror, and a much wider field of vision. But Webb is different from Hubble in a much more fundamental way: it’s designed to see the universe in infrared light, rather than in Hubble’s wider range of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths.

This means that images made public are more likely to be color-coded to reflect variations in the infrared spectrum, just like pictures of the Spitzer space telescope has been. Infrared telescopes are particularly suitable for looking through shrouds of obscuring dust to see what happens inside protoplanetary disks, or mapping cosmological boundaries affected by relativistic redshifting.

Levesque expects infrared readings from JWST to contribute to his own research, which focuses on how the largest stars in the universe evolve and die.

Geek of the week: Emily Levesque watches massive stars and revisits the history of astronomy

“Some of the big dying stars that I study, the red supergiants, are actually fascinating to study in infrared light,” she said.

One example is star Betelgeuse, who made the headlines a few years ago when she went through a mysterious cycle of gradation and enlightenment. Astronomers eventually determined that the gradation was likely caused by a cloud of dust.

“If James Webb had been able to observe Betelgeuse when this happened, he would have seen something very different, because that same dust that blocks the light we see with our eyes is actually glowing and giving off a pretty good amount of infrared light. . said Lévesque. “It will be a whole new way of looking at these stars that we have never been able to handle before because we cannot get these kinds of observations from the ground.”

But the discoveries Levesque looks forward to the most, assuming JWST survives his journey to L2, are the discoveries astronomers don’t expect.

“There’s that famous Hubble sighting, the Hubble Deep Field, where they pointed Hubble at what looked like an empty piece of sky, and they just let it take a really long shot,” he said. she declared. “And when the picture came back, it was just galaxies far from wall to wall.” It was this amazing picture of what the distant universe looks like. And it surprised everyone, how amazing the picture was. I can’t wait to see what the equivalent of James Webb will be.

As you listen to Levesque talk about what Webb could bring, you can’t help but think of a child waiting for Santa Claus.

“I’m excited for Christmas,” she said.

Five quick facts about JWST

• The telescope was named after the late NASA Administrator James Webb, who ran the space agency from 1961 to 1968. Some astronomers have called for Webb’s name to be deleted, saying he agrees with the government’s discrimination against LGTBQ employees in the 1950s and 1960s. NASA says the name is here to stay.

• JWST was built by Northrop Grumman under the supervision of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and was to be shipped from California to French Guiana via the Panama Canal. Details of the trip have been kept secret, in part to frustrate hackers who might seek to take the telescope hostage. Under its partnership with NASA, the European Space Agency has been guaranteed at least 15% of the observation time. (He got 30%.)

• The telescope has four scientific instruments: the Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam; the near infrared spectrograph, or NIRSpec; the Medium Infrared Instrument, or MIRI; and the Canadian Space Agency’s Fine Guidance Sensor / Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, or FGS / NIRISS.

• JWST mirror and detectors shall be cooled to a temperature of about 388 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (40 Kelvin or -233 degrees Celsius) to function properly. This is a big challenge, as the solar radiation is expected to heat the “hot side” of the telescope’s lens hood to near boiling temperatures, as high as 185 degrees F (85 degrees C).

• The telescope is designed for at least five and a half years of operation (six months for calibration, plus five years of scientific operations), but scientists hope it will last much longer. The limiting factor should be the fuel to maintain its halo orbit at L2. There is enough fuel for at least 10 years, and that’s theoretically possible to refuel the spacecraft if NASA really, really wants it.

UW astronomer Emily Levesque is planning a series of in-person and virtual events to celebrate the release of the paperback edition of “The last astronomers”, his behind-the-scenes look at the people who use the world’s most powerful telescopes. The first event will take place at Ada’s technical books in Seattle January 4. There will also be a virtual event presented by Books for third place on January 5 and an event on January 21 at Paper boat booksellers.

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