Posted on 01/15/2022 7:42:56 PM PST by Steely Tom
JWST is now less than 100K miles from it's L2 destination.
Its current speed is 0.1731 miles per second, or about 623 mph. This speed is slowly decreasing as it approaches its equilibrium distance from Earth. It will take another eight days to close the remaining distance to its destination; the first 798,000 miles has been traveled in 21 days, 15 hours.
JWST cold side is at -200°C, only 73° above absolute zero.
Apparently America still has a couple of Rocket Scientists.
For how many more years?
Good. Once it levels up, it’ll be much harder to defeat.
It will still be several months before we get any pictures.
Apparently America still has German Rocket Scientists.
Our German rocket scientists were better than the USSR's German rocket scientists.
Well, they aren’t Border over-runners....
That’s good for the Jamaican Waterslide Team.
Yeah, the commissioning process is very slow. One reason is that a lot of compromises were made in the design to save weight and power while still achieving the requisite precision. Some of these compromises result in very slow movement of telescope parts away from their safe "launch positions." Also every step of the deployment and commissioning process is done with the most extreme degree of caution, cross-checking, and verification that everything is as it should be.
Understandable under the circumstances. They traded speed for weight savings. Also the orbital trajectory is interesting. It's like rolling a bowling ball up a miles-high, smooth mountain, with exactly the right direction and velocity to bring it to a dead stop exactly at the summit. They do get a couple of corrective rocket burns on the way, but they want to keep the amount of fuel burned for these to an absolute minimum.
Lordy I hope we got it right
What you better hope is that we got the prescription right on the grind. If not then we got nothing
Thanks for the update! Can’t wait to see the first images, I know it’s gonna be a while yet- like another five months or so…
Orbital mechanics has never been my forte. It’s just amazing to me how astronomers from 2-300 years ago were able to work all this out in the first place. I’m impressed by the ability of the technicians today to pull this off.
It's going to be absolutely incredible, assuming everything works as planned.
The entire telescope is going to be only a few dozen degrees above absolute zero. They're cooling the main image sensors to 40° K by means of active refrigeration. That will permit observation at amazingly long infrared wavelengths, out to 28 microns. A military-grade FLIR camera with cooled optics goes out to about 14 microns at most.
28 microns is the peak wavelength emitted by a black body at 105°K, or -270°F. This corresponds to extremely old, red-shifted light.
The IR pictures should be interesting to view
Any alien bases on the dark side of the moon better watch out.
Hmm. That just made me think of something I don't want to say on the internet.
This one has the potential to adjust the focus, so that shouldnt be too much of a problem
Fun fact: in the one hour since I posted this, JWST has lost about 1.8 mph of radial velocity with respect to Earth.
There are actually three separate prescriptions, one for each of the three ring-shaped zones in which the various mirror elements are located.
I'm pretty confident they've been checked, double-checked, and triple-checked in the 16 years or so since they were made.
I think this is an amazing engineering feat!
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