Telescope to answer 'biggest questions'
The ultimate goal of James Webb Space Telescope is to find out whether Earth is unique or whether there are similar planets that could give rise to life.
Published: 05:12 PM,Dec 10,2021 | EDITED : 09:12 PM,Dec 10,2021
webb
Paris: It's been three decades in the making: the largest and most powerful telescope ever to be launched into space is finally ready to take up its orbit and beam back new clues to the origins of the Universe and Earth-like planets beyond our solar system.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, named for a former director of the American space agency, follows in the footsteps of the legendary Hubble -- but intends to show humans what the Universe looked like even closer to its birth nearly 14 billion years ago.
In a recent Tweet chat, cosmologist and astrophysicist John Mather, who co-founded the Webb project, described the telescope's unprecedented sensitivity.
'#JWST can see the heat signature of a bumblebee at the distance of the Moon,' he tweeted.
All that power is needed to detect the weak glow emitted billions of years ago by the very first galaxies to exist and the first stars being formed.
Hubble is capable of observing events that happened in space some 500 million years after the Big Bang, and Webb can go back even further to around 200 million years after that event.
It will also give new information about nearly 5,000 exoplanets.
While we know some planets outside our solar system are the right distance from their stars to make them habitable, scientists also want to know what their atmospheres are like and whether they could contain water.
The ultimate goal is to find out whether Earth is unique or whether there are similar planets that could give rise to life.
The telescope is unequalled in size and complexity.
Its mirror measures 6.5 metres (21 feet) in diameter -- three times the size of the one on the Hubble telescope -- and is made of 18 hexagonal sections.
It is so large that it had to be folded in order to fit into the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry it to its orbit.
Once the telescope is in place, the challenge will be to fully deploy the mirror and a tennis-court-sized sun shield -- a process that will take two weeks.
Its orbit around the sun will be 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) from the Earth, much farther away than Hubble, which has been 600 kilometres above the Earth since 1990.
An Ariane 5 rocket is now set to carry it into space on December 22, and it is estimated that it will take a month to reach its point of orbit.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, named for a former director of the American space agency, follows in the footsteps of the legendary Hubble -- but intends to show humans what the Universe looked like even closer to its birth nearly 14 billion years ago.
In a recent Tweet chat, cosmologist and astrophysicist John Mather, who co-founded the Webb project, described the telescope's unprecedented sensitivity.
'#JWST can see the heat signature of a bumblebee at the distance of the Moon,' he tweeted.
All that power is needed to detect the weak glow emitted billions of years ago by the very first galaxies to exist and the first stars being formed.
Hubble is capable of observing events that happened in space some 500 million years after the Big Bang, and Webb can go back even further to around 200 million years after that event.
It will also give new information about nearly 5,000 exoplanets.
While we know some planets outside our solar system are the right distance from their stars to make them habitable, scientists also want to know what their atmospheres are like and whether they could contain water.
The ultimate goal is to find out whether Earth is unique or whether there are similar planets that could give rise to life.
The telescope is unequalled in size and complexity.
Its mirror measures 6.5 metres (21 feet) in diameter -- three times the size of the one on the Hubble telescope -- and is made of 18 hexagonal sections.
It is so large that it had to be folded in order to fit into the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry it to its orbit.
Once the telescope is in place, the challenge will be to fully deploy the mirror and a tennis-court-sized sun shield -- a process that will take two weeks.
Its orbit around the sun will be 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) from the Earth, much farther away than Hubble, which has been 600 kilometres above the Earth since 1990.
An Ariane 5 rocket is now set to carry it into space on December 22, and it is estimated that it will take a month to reach its point of orbit.