Science
Related: About this forumBeyond the Hubble telescope
Few things can inspire awe in me like astronomy. Saw this item on Daily Kos and thought it would be appreciated here.
Beyond the Hubble
Ask anyone to name a telescope and odds are one answer will come up every time: Hubble. Not as many know it was named after Edwin Hubble, the father of modern cosmology, who found the universe wasn't just far larger than we dared imagine, its very fabric was expanding in all directions at warp speeds every second of every day. Hubble the man expanded our appreciation of the universe and our place in it much the same way Hubble the telescope has blown our minds with thousands of images since.
For 25 years the Hubble Space Telescope has graced our textbooks and computer monitors with a seemingly endless procession of jaw-dropping beauty hidden far away, in tiny spacesfrom our perspective. It stares at a hunk of sky the size of a dust grain once thought totally empty and finds hundreds of primeval galaxies, each an island universe, each one made of billions of stars. It glances briefly at a distant supernova remnant and we fall into infinitely recursive filaments and sheets of star-stuff. You could spend hours and hours scrolling through Hubble space porn and not see the half of it. Not a bad rebound for an instrument that first went up half-blind, needing corrective glasses.
Of course like all man-made devices, Hubble's days were always numbered. It is nearing the end of its operational life. There is a successor slated for launch as early as 2018. It's big, it's bad, it's even a little risky. But boy howdy, if it works as designed, we will all be the richer. James Webb Space Telescope.
James Webb Space Telescope.
The JWST is named after James Webb, an important NASA administrator during the space race heyday. Webb the telescope is the size of a tennis court and designed to provide far greater resolution than Hubble, at least 10 to 20 times better, and as much as 100 times or more as it comes completely onlinenever underestimate the ability of clever astronomers to tweak and tease out every last photon! But the tech upgrades don't stop there.
The rest is here.
Response to RussBLib (Original post)
Warren DeMontague This message was self-deleted by its author.
opiate69
(10,129 posts)I seriously can't wait to see the images it starts sending back.
Response to opiate69 (Reply #3)
Warren DeMontague This message was self-deleted by its author.
opiate69
(10,129 posts)(yeah.. been crazy busy... gotta pop in from time to time though.)
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)The Hubble was able to be maintained and upgraded many times because of its orbit
The JWST orbit is way out there at a L2 distance but hopefully we will have craft that can reach it.
About Webb's Orbit
The James Webb Space Telescope will observe primarily the infrared light from faint and very distant objects. But all objects, including telescopes, also emit infrared light. To avoid swamping the very faint astronomical signals with radiation from the telescope, the telescope and its instruments must be very cold. Therefore, Webb has a large shield that blocks the light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon, which otherwise would heat up the telescope, and interfere with the observations. To have this work, Webb must be in an orbit where all three of these objects are in about the same direction. The answer is to put Webb in an orbit around the L2 point.
The L2 orbit is an elliptical orbit about the semi-stable second Lagrange point . It is one of the five solutions by the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange in the 18th century to the three-body problem. Lagrange was searching for a stable configuration in which three bodies could orbit each other yet stay in the same position relative to each other. He found five such solutions, and they are called the five Lagrange points in honor of their discoverer.
In three of the solutions found by Lagrange, the bodies are in line (L1, L2, and L3); in the other two, the bodies are at the points of equilateral triangles (L4 and L5). The five Lagrangian points for the Sun-Earth system are shown in the diagram below. An object placed at any one of these 5 points will stay in place relative to the other two.
In the case of Webb, the 3 bodies involved are the Sun, the Earth and the Webb. Normally, an object circling the Sun further out than the Earth would take more than one year to complete its orbit. However, the balance of gravitational pull at the L2 point means that Webb will keep up with the Earth as it goes around the Sun. The gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth can nearly hold a spacecraft at this point, so that it takes relatively little rocket thrust to keep the spacecraft in orbit around L2.
THIS IS THE DISTANCE IT WILL BE AT
http://jwst.nasa.gov/orbit.html
Response to Ichingcarpenter (Reply #2)
Warren DeMontague This message was self-deleted by its author.
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)well that sounds self assuring.
Response to Ichingcarpenter (Reply #7)
Warren DeMontague This message was self-deleted by its author.