Eyes on the Skies: NASA Launches the James Webb Telescope
Image Courtesy of NASA
By Garrett Farrell
When I was 7 years old, I read a fantasy story, and someone in this story used scrying to look back in time to find an answer to a riddle. When I was 14 years old and started becoming interested in science, I learned that because the speed of light is finite and the universe is unbounded, it is possible to see millions of years into the past by looking at certain stars in the sky and that the Hubble, our most sophisticated telescope in space at the time, had observed a star that was 13.3 billion light-years away (in other words, a star that was from the first 400 million years of the universe). Then, when I was 21 years old, I learned that NASA had launched the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is 100 times more powerful than Hubble, and could conceivably see back even farther into the nascent universe, perhaps into the first 100 million years. Safe to say, the 7-year-old inside me had his mind blown.
The JWST is a feat of engineering that is nearly unparalleled in the history of space exploration; it has forty systems onboard, including a heat shield to protect the imaging equipment, fuel for ten years. Remarkably the telescope is only 28 feet across, which is 40% smaller than the Hubble (not to mention the fact that it was sent into space with six of its mirrors folded back so it could fit on the European Space Agency rocket that it was sent up in).
In addition to ESA, NASA was assisted in this endeavor by Canada, which contributed the heat shield that will protect the sensors from the heat of space. The need for the heat shield comes from the immense sensitivity of the imaging equipment on the telescope: it is so sensitive that if any heat from the Earth or Sun were to reach the sensor, the telescope would be blinded, and NASA would have effectively flushed $10 billion of taxpayers’ money down the toilet.
“Hold up,” I hear you saying, dear reader. “This telescope cost that much to build?” Why yes indeed, it did cost more than most of us will ever dream of making in our lifetimes. Should we care about that? Absolutely not.
For one thing, the appropriation for this telescope was made in 2011 and amounted to a fraction of the national budget that year. For another thing, this telescope could do more for the advancement of science than any other piece of technology in history, save for the Large Hadron Collider. This opens the door to understanding the forces at play in the infant universe: dark matter, cosmic background radiation, and stellar dynamics will all be more accessible to scientists. The answers we get to these questions will help us answer questions like “Where did we come from?” “Where are we going?” and most importantly “Are we alone?” Surely the answers to such fundamentally human questions are worth a little less than 1% of the federal budget.
On Monday, January 24 of this year, the JWST began its orbit around its second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), which is roughly 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. The telescope will remain in orbit around this point for the remainder of its ideally 10-year-long lifetime. Now, scientists begin the process of cooling down Webb’s instruments to the optimal temperature, aligning the optical equipment at the nanometer level, and testing the equipment on board.
Science is paramountly dedicated to the advancement of human knowledge and understanding, and the construction, launch, and deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope is the distillation of this purpose. The knowledge gained from this cooperative effort by the United States, Canada, and the 22 member states of the ESA has the potential to shape the future of humanity and guide us to worlds beyond Earth. The first images from Webb are expected in 6 months.
