This is pretty cool. Looking forward to decades of great pics and findings.
With private sector SpaceX and like, I wonder if they could (or would want to risk) to pull this off. Seemingly with limited commercial appeal but vast potential for science.
Hubble's enormous, ambitious successor is poised to change our understanding of the universe | Salon.com
Quote:
Folded like a $9.7 billion piece of metal origami and nestled into the nose of an Ariane 5 rocket, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will, in late December, be sent nearly one million miles from the surface of the Earth. Once it reaches its destination — a region of space with open views, where the sun and Earth's gravity counterbalance each other — the Hubble telescope's bigger, grander successor will spend the next decade answering questions that are as scientific as they are existential.
"How did we get here? What is the universe? And how did it come into being?" said David Hunter, a project manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute. "With something like the JWST, you actually have a tangible way of finding answers."
Over two decades of work — totaling 100 million hours of labor from more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians — went into the development of this next-generation space telescope. For their efforts, Webb will be able to peer into distant corners of the universe, using infrared detection to penetrate clouds of dust, survey the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets, and look backward in time over 13 billion years, picking up faint light emitted by galaxies formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
|