Posted on 12/25/2021 11:37:59 AM PST by Fractal Trader
The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope rocketed away Saturday on a high-stakes quest to behold light from the first stars and galaxies and scour the universe for hints of life.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope soared from French Guiana on South America’s northeastern coast, riding a European Ariane rocket into the Christmas morning sky.
The $10 billion observatory hurtled toward its destination 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away, or more than four times beyond the moon. It will take a month to get there and another five months before its infrared eyes are ready to start scanning the cosmos.
First, the telescope’s enormous mirror and sunshield need to unfurl; they were folded origami-style to fit into the rocket's nose cone. Otherwise, the observatory won’t be able to peer back in time 13.7 billion years as anticipated, within a mere 100 million years of the universe-forming Big Bang.
“It’s going to give us a better understanding of our universe and our place in it: who we are, what we are, the search that’s eternal,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said earlier this week.
But he cautioned: “When you want a big reward, you have to usually take a big risk.”
Intended as a successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, the long-delayed James Webb is named after NASA’s administrator during the 1960s. NASA partnered with the European and Canadian space agencies to build and launch the new 7-ton telescope, with thousands of people from 29 countries working on it since the 1990s.
With the launch falling on Christmas and a global surge in COVID-19 cases, there were fewer spectators at the French Guiana launch site than expected. Nelson bowed out along with a congressional delegation and many contractors who worked on the telescope.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
Did they check the calibration on the mirror before launching it?
Video of the launch
James Webb Space Telescope blasts off into space on Ariane 5 rocket.
https://rumble.com/vrek5g-james-webb-space-telescope-blasts-off-into-space-on-ariane-5-rocket..html
Each segment of the mirror is capable of being independently adjusted.
Is the disgronificator properly aligned?
RE: I heard that it will orbit one million miles above the earth.Can they transmit high quality images that far?
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You just wait until you see the prints when they arrive at WalGreen’s. You will be really impressed.
I hate to think if the launch would have been a failure, as 10 billion would have gone down the drain. But I am delighted to hear they made it!
It will orbit the sun parallel to the earth’s orbit.
Data can be transmitted millions of miles in space.
RE: Did they check the calibration on the mirror before launching it?
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Darn. Can’t think of everything.
When the Hubble device was blurry comedian Mark Russell said that due to budget cutbacks they were sending an optometrist from Pearl Vision on the space shuttle to make adjustments. “Saving some money but getting the job done.”
Short answer...yes. Higher definition just takes more time to transmit. But time is, for all practical purposes, essentially indefinite..so the ultimate image is not limited by transmission, but by the design of the telescope itself (pixel count of the imaging sensor, sharpness of image focus, and similar factors). .
Sure hope they kept all the hinges on the folding contraption well lubed during the years of storage.
Destination is the L2 Lagrange Point.
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/orbit.html
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/754/what-is-a-lagrange-point/
They’re still getting data from the Voyagers and I trust you’ve seen some of the pix from the various Mars missions.
Why? Brandon gave $85 billion to the taliban.
I hate to think if the launch would have been a failure, as 10 billion would have gone down the drain.
Thought soetoro defunded nasa. Defunding part II coming up next prob.
It’s a shame that most of America will hear news about the successful launch and just kind of shrug and say “that’s kind of neat that they launched a satellite on Christmas”, then go back to their day.
The geometry and complexity of the satellite are impressive, grtting the vehicle to the orbit is impressive and more complicated than normal, the mission, while not particularly sexy like shooting men to the moon or setting off nukes on Mars or something, is very interesting to science, and as complicated and expensive as the whole mission is, it’s the simplest, cheapest way for science to gather the types of information that they’ve chosen to look for.
It would be a fascinating mission to punch into an asteroid and then let that asteroid carry the camera to the outer parts of the solar system. If you do this with 5 or 6 asteroids, your field of vision would be gigantic, with nothing but empty space to peer through rather than atmosphere.
I’m not sure on that in the medium to long term. If this thing works like it should it’ll be hailed in the media a lot. Hubble sure has been, everyone knows about it. NASAs been doing really good work with the Mars and exploration work in general for a long time now, so I’m not surprised it’s not the biggest news for now. Last I saw Ingenuity on Mars was still flying, but no peep in the media much after the 2nd or 3rd flight.
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