World's Largest Space Telescope Is Complete, Expected To Launch In 2018 (space.com) 156
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: After more than 20 years of construction, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is complete and, following in-depth testing, the largest-ever space telescope is expected to launch within two years, NASA officials announced today (Nov. 2). NASA Administrator Charles Bolden hosted a news conference to announce the milestone this morning at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, overlooking the 18 large mirrors that will collect infrared light, sheltered behind a tennis-court-size sun shield. JWST is considered the successor to NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope will be much more powerful than even Hubble for two main reasons, Mather said at the conference. First, it will be the biggest telescope mirror to fly in space. "You can see this beautiful, gold telescope is seven times the collecting area of the Hubble telescope," Mather said. And second, it is designed to collect infrared light, which Hubble is not very sensitive to. Earth's atmosphere glows in the infrared, so such measurements can't be made from the ground. Hubble emits its own heat, which would obscure infrared readings. JWST will run close to absolute zero in temperature and rest at a point in space called the Lagrange Point 2, which is directly behind Earth from the sun's perspective. That way, Earth can shield the telescope from the sun's infrared emission, and the sun shield can protect the telescope from both bodies' heat. The telescope's infrared view will pierce through obscuring cosmic dust to reveal the universe's first galaxies and spy on newly forming planetary systems. It also will be sensitive enough to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets that pass in front of their stars, perhaps to search for signs of life, Mather said. The telescope would be able to see a bumblebee a moon's distance away, he added -- both in reflected light and in the body heat the bee emitted. Its mirrors are so smooth that if you stretched the array to the size of the U.S., the hills and valleys of irregularity would be only a few inches high, Mather said.
Gold you say? (Score:4, Funny)
You can see this beautiful, gold telescope is seven times the collecting area of the Hubble telescope
I guess we need to hope president Trump doesn't decide to melt it down to make a new white house toilet.
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It will be renamed the Vladimir Putin Mother Russia telescope. And it will be pointed at earth.
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Americans you are ridiculous. Ok I get it you have a two party system and therefore you are not accustomed to have different opinions in politics. It is always there team against ours. The truth is, it is you country. The country of all of you. Conservatives, liberals, socialists, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Atheists, Indians, etc. and you all life there. Unfortunately, for the next president you have two choices. They both have a big ego. And I am not sure if you could trust them, but you have to
Re: Gold you say? (Score:1)
China actually holds very little of US debt.
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Do you mean government debt? I am talking about the US trade deficit which is balanced by the US trade partners by buying dollars. The biggest lender in this context is China, as 40% of the US trade deficit comes from the trade with China (approx $ 29 billion per year). In total the US have around $ 41 billion deficit per year (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/balance-of-trade).
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Wow you're retarded on so many levels... Try reading your source again. China owns 30% of all foreign US debt, however as a total percentage of US debt, China only has about 6.2%. Even if it were 30% (which again, it's not) they couldn't "ruin" the US, because that debt is mostly in the form of bills, notes, and bonds, which means that the US government merely has to follow a set pay schedule and isn't subject to anybody doing anything such as calling in debts. If Trump were elected (which I doubt) he could
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If Trump were elected (which I doubt) he could totally give China the middle finger, and maybe they'd stop buying any bonds in the future, but beyond that the US would simply continue to pay off its debts on schedule and everything would continue as it already has.
Except that it wouldn't just be China refusing to buy our bonds, but everybody. You don't get to default on that much debt and keep borrowing, and you don't get to stiff a specific bondholder without the others saying "hmmm, I wonder who's next."
Also, most bond debts are fungible and freely negotiable; if we refuse to pay China, China sells it on the open market and recoups most of its loss...if it can find a buyer (see credibility problem above).
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if China stopped investing in US Treasury notes and bills, do you really think that that nobody else wouldn't be having the same thoughts and start unloading their holdings?
I don't think so. If China dumped, the price would fall, raising the effective interest rate. So others would see a really good deal, and buy. In fact, the Fed might just buy it all. $1.185 trillion is about the same as one year of QE2 ($80B/month). It would hurt the USA somewhat, but it would hurt China far more. Not only would they lose billions on their investment, but the weakened dollar would depress American imports, putting millions of Chinese into unemployment.
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Way off-topic here
At an island stop on a Caribbean cruise, the QE2 was in port along with my ship & some others. The QE2 sailors were in uniform as they snooped in the shops & strolled the streets. If you engaged them in conversation - no matter what the subject was - they would all manage to wedge in - "She'll do thirty knots!".
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No.
There is no effective market for US treasuries. In every auction, if the price even starts to rise, the federal reserve buys them all.
That is why stopping 'quantitative easing' isn't easy. They have a target rate, the money required to be printed to maintain that rate is an unknown. If the interest rate goes much higher than the target, the government goes broke before schedule.
That being said, US treasuries are the _good part_ of chinese bank reserves. The rest is bubble real estate, Shanghai sto
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the risk of the US gov defaulting on their debt is considered very low.
It is sovereign debt, issued by the US government in a currency the government controls. So the USA can just print dollars to monitize the debt. The risk of default is essentially zero. The real risk is that the value of the dollar may fall, but there is no sign of that happening.
When countries default on their debts, like Argentina and Greece, it is because the debt is denominated in a currency that they do not control, so monetizing the debt is not an option. Argentina's debt was in US dollars, and Gr
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But if China stopped investing in US Treasury notes and bills, do you really think that that nobody else wouldn't be having the same thoughts and start unloading their holdings?
China already stopped buying US Treasuries. In fact, they did so more than 5 years ago. Has economic disaster struck yet?
China was buying US Treasuries to keep the Dollar up versus Yuan. That only works for so long, and China stopped buying when it stopped working. And the fact that virtually no one has noticed kinda indicates the predictions of doom are a wee bit overblown.
You cannot simply default on one creditor but not the other ones.
Sure you can. Don't send the interest payments to China via sanctions or a similar mechanism.
Now, you may not be able to contain t
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As long as the fed prints money and buys all the leftovers, that will continue to be true.
If the fed wasn't buying the bonds, we would know the open market rate for US debt. Until then, we know fuckall.
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You apparently haven't heard of the War Powers Resolution (a.k.a. the War Powers Act.) Essentially, the President can run hog wild for 60 days.
Budget restrictions have little affect on a President (like Obama) who has no intention of following the law. Just recently, he's been shoveling dollars for a program explicitly prohibited by Congress from "surplusses" within the same department.
Budget control in recent years has been a crude and ineffectual tool. All the President's proposed budgets have been reject
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Possible bullshit story (para):
Jr Engineer at NASA: The beancounters want to know why we want to use a gold surfaced mirror, what should I tell them?
W. Von Braun: Tell them a solid gold mirror would be too heavy.
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did they double-check the mirror this time? And compensate for zero-G?
The testing is particularly high-stakes, because unlike Hubble, which was repaired and refocused in orbit by astronauts, this telescope is not intended to be repaired by humans.
Yikes. Isn't that sort of like announcing that your vehicle doesn't have seatbelts, so instead you're going to drive very, very carefully? Well, I guess that's not unusual for rocket science.
"Our lessons learned from the Hubble [telescope incident] were, if you really care about something, you've got to measure it at least twice," Mather added. "And if you don't get the same answer, you'd better figure out why."
Maybe they should have talked to a carpenter?
Ok, kidding aside... I really do hope it fares much better than Hubble's initial deployment. There's certainly a lot that can go wrong during development or deployment. But if all goes well, I'm looking forward to seeing what images are captured from the edge of the visible universe.
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
I really do hope it fares much better than Hubble's initial deployment. There's certainly a lot that can go wrong during development or deployment. But if all goes well, I'm looking forward to seeing what images are captured from the edge of the visible universe.
I'm guessing they will see this. (Safe for work.)
http://i.imgur.com/RrCGkyQ.jpg [imgur.com]
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"http://i.imgur.com/RrCGkyQ.jpg [imgur.com]"
Oh, you Monoturtleists...
It's Turtles all the way down.
Polyturtlism is the only explanation.
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Accounting tasks and displacing accounting clerks was one of the first big set of computing tasks.
It made 'chartered accounting' less drab and awful, less manually added up columns. Still not 'lion taming'.
Giving credit to accountants for the computer revolution is a stretch though. Like crediting manual loom workers for the automated textile revolution.
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I'm looking forward to seeing what images are captured from the edge of the visible universe.
Just some tentacles... and darkness.
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The testing is particularly high-stakes, because unlike Hubble, which was repaired and refocused in orbit by astronauts, this telescope is not intended to be repaired by humans.
Yikes. Isn't that sort of like announcing that your vehicle doesn't have seatbelts, so instead you're going to drive very, very carefully? Well, I guess that's not unusual for rocket science.
As mentioned in the summary, the JWT will go to the Lagrangian Point 2 (L2), for the Sun-Earth system. This point is substantially farther than the Moon, so there's no way (at least with current technology) that we're sending men that far. So, it's not that they're betting it all on having it done right this time so we don't need to check. It's just "we're saying goodbye to it, so it better be good."
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ESA have already put two space observatories, the Herschel infrared telescope and the Planck cosmic microwave background telescope into the L2 location. The JWT is being launched and deployed by ESA so it's not an absolute first for them.
ESA is paying for the launch and that entitles European scientists access to the instrument and data collected by it.
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And most recently ESA put Gaia in L2.
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Huh... so just how much stuff can be crammed into this Lagrange "point" anyway?
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They are not actually all sitting in L2: they 'orbit' around the L2 point (eg halo or Lissajous).
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Did they double-check the mirror this time? And compensate for zero-G?
And remember there's a difference between inches and centimetres.
Don't forget that on the rocket, the arrows should be pointing upwards.
Have they tuned the radio link to the correct frequency?
Luckily this telescope doesn't need parachutes. But they'd better put a screen-wipe in the package in case the mirror gets dusty between now and launch-day.
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they double-check the mirror this time?
The thing with the Hubble telescope mirror is that engineers at Perkin-Elmer did double-check the mirror with accurate instruments and knew that it was flawed after the figuring was complete. But refiguring it would have cost a lot of money, and delayed delivery (already late), and the improperly assembled null corrector test instrument that was used to figure the mirror was also the contractual acceptance test. So managers and execs and Perkin-Elmer decided to deliver the mirror to NASA anyway, in conformance with contract, without conveying the internal information that the mirror didn't work.
This echos the situation with the Challenger disaster when management at Thiokol decided (after hours of complaint from a very unhappy NASA) to authorize the cold weather launch despite knowing that disaster was almost certain.
The Very First Image from the Edge of the Universe (Score:2)
... will be that of a book floating in space.
It has the title:
"Postcards from the edge"
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James Webb is designed as a primarily IR telescope. You don't want to park it in low orbit because it would be subject to a lot of IR interference from the planet. So they're putting it at L2, which is a long way away from the planet. Unfortunately we can only really send astronauts to low orbit to fix things. So there's not really much choice about the repairability of the JW.
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I just imagine the NASA technician who is perpetually late to work and has to use the broken tape measure every day because all the good ones are taken already...
If it took 20 years, I hope they built 2 or 3 (Score:2)
of them, to account for the rather high probability of launch failure.
With an engineering project that long, 3 copies should have cost pretty close to the cost of one of them, since the whole project was probabl 90% labour costs.
I for one would be right pissed if my 20 years of work went kaboom because of a helium fuelling mishap.
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Ummm a helium "fuelling" leak in the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket most likely caused the latest launchpad "mishap".
There's a compressed helium tank inside the LOX tank. Not sure but my guess is the helium is let out to maintain pressure in the LOX tank as the oxygen is used up in combustion.
Why so long? (Score:1, Interesting)
20 years? That's a long time for something that has been done before. Maybe they were extra careful as the website suggests but 20 years is a bit excessive.
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The funding was cancelled at one point. Lots of political starts and stops.
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This thing is all new technology. That's like saying that building a skyscraper takes too long because you already knew how to build a house.
This thing is an amazing piece of technology.
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Please point to where "this has been done before" - show me a functioning piece of equipment at the L2 Lagrange point with the same capabilities as this hardware.
Oh wait, you can't, because it *hasn't* been done before.
Stop posting when you don't have a clue.
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It's a good question, but more importantly, if it's ready now, why wait 2 years to launch it?
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The mirrors are extremely well-polished beryllium because its atomic mass is like 1/8th or so of silver. The dust is toxic as fuck so it was a bitch to do. And lots of other things like this kept popping up.
Apparently though, the JWST is supposed to make the hubble look like a shitty pair of reading glasses so I'm excited as all hell to see what it produces... and that's not even counting the huuuge boon for infrared astronomy.
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Never own a car 'too nice to drive' those belong in museums. If you own a car museum, you are the exception.
Fly this thing.
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Re:Please, don't let SpaceX launch it. (Score:5, Informative)
ESA is going to launch it, seriously.
It's going up on an Ariane V launcher using a French-derived LOX/LH2 engine and Italian solid-rocket boosters with a lot of German sparkly bits to do the control.
Saying "the French" is like saying NASA = "Floridans".
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ESA is going to pay for the launch, French company Arianespace will provide the rocket. Of course, Arianespace has lots of subcontractors all across Europe..
And the launch complex is on French soil.
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"World's largest" (Score:2)
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Number of optical telescopes currently in orbit that have a larger mirror than JWST: 0.
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We have no information on how large Misty's mirror is, so I'm not inclined to count it as larger than JWST.
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Secret telescopes tend to be military satellites in low earth orbit. To get militarily useful details, they have to be fairly large (Rayleigh Criterion). They are large enough that they can be (and are) tracked by amateur astronomers. Tracking launches is also a popular amateur activity.
I suppose it's possible to use stealth technology on a satellite, and satellites do get lost occasionally. It just doesn't seen likely that they'd go to the trouble because everyone knows there are surveillance satellites.
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We already have retroreflectors installed by the astronauts at their landing sites that you can bounce a laser of sufficient power off of.
The only people that don't think Apollo landed on the moon, are idiots that refuse to look at the overwhelming evidence, combined with the fact that no government project to fake something like that could have ever existed in secret for the last 45 years; and the "other team" in the Space Race would have loved to discredit the moon landings with any tracking data they und
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Yeah, because a Three Stooges film exactly replicates the necessary physics and detail of a moon landing hoax.
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That would be a good idea, given SpaceX still immature technology, if you could build the satellites for cheap and turn them out in a year or less, you can afford the higher failure rate of launches, since you could get another one up quickly should one fail.
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Good luck launching a single piece mirror that big.
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Im curious, how does the craft obtain power with its solar pannels? Being in the L2, it will be in earths shadow...
It is not in L2. It orbits it with a 250,000 mile radius orbit, and thus never gets close to the Earth's shadow.
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It is not in L2. It orbits it with a 250,000 mile radius orbit, and thus never gets close to the Earth's shadow.
So then the earth does not shield it from the sun's infrared emissions, contrary to what the summary says. Or am I missing something?
Re: Solar powered? (Score:1)
You're correct, the summary is wrong. The sunshield is what shades the telescope from the Sun. It orbits L2 to keep it out of the Earth's shadow to prevent eclipses.
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A rebuild to the same design would be much, much quicker. There are likely 'flight-spare' versions of most of the instruments sitting in clean rooms right now actually.
Re:Hopefully will launch on Atlas or Delta (Score:5, Informative)
And even if it were to be launched on a "domestic" rocket, it is far, far too late in the program to launch on SpaceX. The choice of launcher gets decided very early on in a program, because the size of the rocket (payload capacity, payload fairing size, flight characteristics, etc.) has to be accounted for during the design of the telescope. By the time they are assembling the telescope, it would be very, very difficult and expensive to switch to a different launcher.
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I know many programs that have requirements to be compatible with several launchers.
That may be true for programs that support many launches (like NavStar = GPS). But one-of-a-kind spacecraft are typically designed for a specific launch vehicle. It's not just the adapter ring, but the fairing envelope and launch vibration loads. Designing for the worst case of all launch vehicles to be compatible with all of them, means the program has to accept serious design compromises. It also means additional cost to verify the design is compatible with all interfaces and complies with the worst c
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Also, ESA has put a few things at L2 already. Experience counts.
Pointless (Score:2)
If only there were bumblebees in space.
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If only there were bumblebees in space.
Well, this should FINALLY let us settle that contentious question!
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If only there were bumblebees in space.
There are! Where do you think Earth is?
thank you (Score:1)
the James Woods telescope (Score:2)
now there's an idea
Could see bumblebee on the moon (Score:2)
According to the project member interviewed on the news.
Measurements (Score:2)
"see a bumblebee a moon's distance away"
I of course welcome our moon measuring bumblebee overlords...
Seriously I guess we can get rid of LoC and other forms of measurement including football fields and metric in favor of measuring all lengths of things in terms of moon distances, and volume in terms of bumblebees.
Seems legit.
Maybe it can find... (Score:2)
Re:None of this matters (Score:4, Funny)
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...Hunger is a Political Greed issue and Socialist use it to exploit the weak, elderly, and poor.
As compared to TRAP (The Rich and Powerful), who would never do that. The poor are screwed: news at 11.
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If the native population of North America had had a strict immigration policy, that would have saved them a lot of trouble...
I'm not sure why you are modded troll. This should be modded insightful, if not informative.
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World hunger is a distribution problem. We have enough food for everyone. Unfortunately, our economic system is not able to solve this distribution problem. Maybe we should fix it. Unfortunately, we are not going to do so, as it is not in the interest of those who have.
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Gee, our sanitation system can't solve the problem either. Nor the hospital system.. Let's blame them.
It's a the political system within starving countries that is the problem, not the economic system here.
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Do you really not know what an economic system is? Here is a hint from wikipedia "An economy (From Greek – "household" and o – "manage") is an area of the production, distribution, or trade, and consumption of goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location." Agents are people and organizations. The sole purpose of it is to support people with the necessities of live. If everyone would have already everything they need, there would be no need for an economy. Therefore, i
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You Greens are now faced with a dilemma. To stop a space telescope, you will have to put on space suits and get into orbit, rather than just showing up in Hawaii and piling rocks on a road. Your dilemma is that doing so will go against everything you people stand for. As an ultimate humiliation, the Russians will probably insist on vaccinations before you get to go to their spaceport and ride in their vehicle.
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Yeah, learning sucks! Fuck the elite learned fat-cats! When has science ever benefited society?
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"Well yeah, if you consider Anthony Weiner's impending tragic suicide - where he ties himself to a chair, then jumps out the 20th floor window, twice! - as "help"."
No, he will overdose on Viagra, causing his "brain" to explode on camera.
Robin Williams in "World's Greatest Dad" (Score:1)
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We should start a betting pool on the variety of items that will be found up his butt.
Anybody know Hillary's shoe size?
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Yeah, because shooting it with rifles would definitely not be "wasting money" at all.
It's already built. The launch costs are insignificant in comparison to what has already been spent. Shoot it up there, and let's learn something, rather than yelling YEEEEEE HAWWWWW and emptying a magazine from a rifle into what might be the world's most precision optical instrumentation.
Just when I thought I've read the most moronic post possible, AC steps up again.