Astronomers Nervously Counting Down to Christmas Eve Launch of $10B Webb Telescope (nytimes.com) 63
"What do astronomers eat for breakfast on the day that their $10 billion telescope launches into space?" asks the New York Times. "Their fingernails."
The worst-case scenario is "You work for years and it all goes up in a puff of smoke," they're told by Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona: Dr. Rieke admits her fingers will be crossed on the morning of December 24 when she tunes in for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. For 20 years, she has been working to design and build an ultrasensitive infrared camera that will live aboard the spacecraft. The Webb is the vaunted bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers expect that it will pierce a dark curtain of ignorance and supposition about the early days of the universe, and allow them to snoop on nearby exoplanets.
After $10 billion and years of delays, the telescope is finally scheduled to lift off from a European launch site in French Guiana on its way to a point a million miles on the other side of the moon... [T]here is plenty to be anxious about. The Ariane 5 rocket that is carrying the spacecraft has seldom failed to deliver its payloads to orbit. But even if it survives the launch, the telescope will have a long way to go. Over the following month it will have to execute a series of maneuvers with 344 "single points of failure" in order to unfurl its big golden mirror and deploy five thin layers of a giant plastic sunscreen that will keep the telescope and its instruments in the cold and dark. Engineers and astronomers call this interval six months of high anxiety because there is no prospect of any human or robotic intervention or rescue should something go wrong.
But if all those steps succeed, what astronomers see through that telescope could change everything. They hope to spot the first stars and galaxies emerging from the primordial fog when the universe was only 100 million years or so old, in short the first steps out of the big bang toward the cozy light show we inhabit today.
Tod Lauer, an astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, remembers the launch of the original Hubble Space Telescope — and told the Times that astronomers had to trust their colleagues in rocket and spacecraft engineering to get it right.
"Someone who knows how to fly a $10 billion spacecraft on a precision trajectory is not going to be impressed by an astronomer, who never took an engineering course in his life, cowering behind his laptop watching the launch," Dr. Lauer said. "You feel admiration and empathy for those people, and try to act worthy of the incredible gift that they are bringing to world."
On Friday the manufacturer of the rocket carrying the teescope tweeted an update. "Target launch date is December 24 at 12:20 am UTC," and confirmed it again on Saturday...
The worst-case scenario is "You work for years and it all goes up in a puff of smoke," they're told by Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona: Dr. Rieke admits her fingers will be crossed on the morning of December 24 when she tunes in for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. For 20 years, she has been working to design and build an ultrasensitive infrared camera that will live aboard the spacecraft. The Webb is the vaunted bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers expect that it will pierce a dark curtain of ignorance and supposition about the early days of the universe, and allow them to snoop on nearby exoplanets.
After $10 billion and years of delays, the telescope is finally scheduled to lift off from a European launch site in French Guiana on its way to a point a million miles on the other side of the moon... [T]here is plenty to be anxious about. The Ariane 5 rocket that is carrying the spacecraft has seldom failed to deliver its payloads to orbit. But even if it survives the launch, the telescope will have a long way to go. Over the following month it will have to execute a series of maneuvers with 344 "single points of failure" in order to unfurl its big golden mirror and deploy five thin layers of a giant plastic sunscreen that will keep the telescope and its instruments in the cold and dark. Engineers and astronomers call this interval six months of high anxiety because there is no prospect of any human or robotic intervention or rescue should something go wrong.
But if all those steps succeed, what astronomers see through that telescope could change everything. They hope to spot the first stars and galaxies emerging from the primordial fog when the universe was only 100 million years or so old, in short the first steps out of the big bang toward the cozy light show we inhabit today.
Tod Lauer, an astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, remembers the launch of the original Hubble Space Telescope — and told the Times that astronomers had to trust their colleagues in rocket and spacecraft engineering to get it right.
"Someone who knows how to fly a $10 billion spacecraft on a precision trajectory is not going to be impressed by an astronomer, who never took an engineering course in his life, cowering behind his laptop watching the launch," Dr. Lauer said. "You feel admiration and empathy for those people, and try to act worthy of the incredible gift that they are bringing to world."
On Friday the manufacturer of the rocket carrying the teescope tweeted an update. "Target launch date is December 24 at 12:20 am UTC," and confirmed it again on Saturday...
24th December (Score:2)
In a short time span it has been reported several times. 18th December, 22 and now 24. The JWST is under the fairing now. Nobody can touch it. Fingers crossed. The public will discover the very 1990's presentation of Ariane launches. "À tous de DDO".
I suspect most engineers have a lot of respect for astronomers even if they haven't taken an engineering course in their life. I know i have.
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*delayed. Faux ami.
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Thankfully it's not Blue Origin (Score:2)
Imagine how different the interview would have gone if they using the Bezos rocket.
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Okay, this telescope is seriously cool (Score:2)
And I look forward to what we learn from it. However the hyperbole towards the end of this article/summary is ridiculous. The astronomers deserve credit for "the incredible gift that they are bringing to world"? Give me a break. This is an extremely expensive piece of equipment - a gift to the astronomers from the taxpayers of the countries involved!
The astronomers should be on their knees thanking everyone.
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The astronomers deserve credit for "the incredible gift that they are bringing to world"? Give me a break. This is an extremely expensive piece of equipment - a gift to the astronomers from the taxpayers of the countries involved!
The astronomers should be on their knees thanking everyone.
They are. Or at least one is. The quote was expressing gratitude to the scientists and engineers responsible for getting the thing into space:
“Someone who knows how to fly a $10 billion spacecraft on a precision trajectory is not going to be impressed by an astronomer, who never took an engineering course in his life, cowering behind his laptop watching the launch,” Dr. Lauer said. “You feel admiration and empathy for those people, and try to act worthy of the incredible gift that they are bringing to world.”
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Re: Okay, this telescope is seriously cool (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they are providing something of value to us taxpayers. Understanding the universe is very valuable to me as a taxpayer. The physics it will unlock will help us do great things. Isaac Newton, Einstein and others used astronomy to figure out laws of the universe that in turn helped us develop things like automobiles and radio. For example, we would not know infra-red even exists without Huygens discovering it from observing the Sun. Same thing with Helium, which was discovered using a technique invented for astronomy - spectroscopy. When I buy an iPhone, I do not consider it a gift to Apple. I appreciate that Apple is able to provide me with something I consider to be of greater value than I am providing it. Why else would I part with my money for an iPhone. It is because, to me, the iPhone is worth more than whatever else I can do with that amount of money.
Re: Okay, this telescope is seriously cool (Score:2)
How white male was Einstein when his paternal haplogroup is E-M215 (Eb1b) ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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"White male capitalists and colonialists???" This is sarcastic joking. Right? RIGHT?.
OKAY. Speaking as someone (slightly more than) tangentially involved with the Hubble (and someone who considers himself an astronomer), yes, I am grateful for the support the JWST has gotten over the years/decades. And that's despite the delays and cost overruns. Even so, I can only hope (and cannot guarantee) that the science will be worth it. But thanks to the incredible views of the universe provided by the Hubble, I exp
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"White male capitalists and colonialists???" This is sarcastic joking. Right? RIGHT?.
Check the username. There's a pointless troll here who got butthurt sometime in the past year and is pretending to be our own beloved troll registering a shitton of accounts with misspellings of rsilvergun but without the low UID to show for it. Not a single post they have ever made across any of their accounts have ever been upvoted, most just end up at -1 very quickly and are absolute garbage.
Just ignore them.
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Re:Okay, this telescope is seriously cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Well as a taxpayer from the country involved, I'm very happy to contribute with this "gift" to the astronomers. I would be more than happy if the government would spend more of my tax money on projects such as this instead of other shit they spend it on.
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The astronomers deserve credit for "the incredible gift that they are bringing to world"?
Well it does have to work before they get any thanks. So hold on.
Slip happens (Score:1)
The purpose of a (proposed) launch date is to get everyone working on the project to work to be sure it is not their fault when (not if) the schedule slips.
Whenever a problem is identified that will cause a delay you can hear thousands of other engineers in other groups sigh in relief that they do not have to take the blame (for they were going to be late, too).
Time not Money (Score:4, Insightful)
My fear about what happens if the launch fails is not the cost, but the time that is lost. While expensive, we can build another one, but it will take many years before it's ready for launch. I would guess we would be lucky to build and launch a replacement in ten years.
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If the launch succeeds but the deployment fails later it may discredit the design. And thus it could be back to square one. Maybe a more monolithic design launched by a Starship.
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"Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?"
- S. R. Hadden
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No, it won't take as many years to re-launch as it did to build the first one.
The reason the telescope took so many years to make was because we're talking about having to design and make something that would work properly the first time, and work reliably for the next 20+ years without maintenance. Now, think of how many things you have that are like that - once you set it up, it will remain working for decades without being touched by human hands ever again. And it's something that consists of mechanical
Space mission to the Web (Score:2)
If we can put a robot on Mars, why wouldn't we be able to send one to the Webb? And hopefully the Web has been designed to be fixed by robots, with easily replaceable modules.
If just a few percent of the money wasted on the space station was spent on this it would have been launched long ago, and we would now be looking towards Web 2.0. Wait...
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Wot? They didn't build two like they usually do?
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No, it's budget for two, build one. Only build the second one if the first one fails. Then if it doesn't, illegally keep the money and build a fancy new headquarters without congressional approval. That's what the NRO did in the 90s.
I don't think NASA ever had the budget to build a replacement.
Waiting for the whiners (Score:4, Informative)
"$10 billion! What a waste of taxpayer money."
The Pentagon's 2021 budget is $778 billion. That's for one year. $10 billion is 0.012 percent of one yearly budget. I can assure you the Pentagon easily wastes $10 billion each and every year for the forseeable future.
Re:Waiting for the whiners (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the military has its place, but imagine the world we'd live in if the Afghanistan blunder budget (~2.3 trillion!) was spent on science and education.
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Yeah, you're right, shouldn't have lumped education in with science spending. Amazing we spend so much per capita and get so little in return.
International Space Station (Score:2)
Imagine what could be done if the Space budget was spent on science, rather that a rather useless space station.
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I understand the military has its place, but imagine the world we'd live in if the Afghanistan blunder budget (~2.3 trillion!) was spent on science and education.
Except in Idaho where Republicans want to spend even less [marketwatch.com] on public education because it's "indoctrinating" kids. As a result, companies are reconsidering opening offices in Idaho.
Re: Waiting for the whiners (Score:1)
That's not hard to image. Take all the graft, self-dealing, money-laundering, gun- and drug-running that you saw in Afghanistan and assume some form of it would happen in the universities.
Instead of guys like Erik Prince being richer than God running mercs on the other side of the planet, he'd be providing "security" for inner city STEM academies out of one set of books and running guns and drugs into the ghettos out of the other set of books...to remind everyone why his legit business services are required
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That was the Pentagon's 2022 budget. We don't yet have a complete budget for the rest of the government but 2021 outlays were $6.8 Trillion. FY2022 (which started Oct. 1, 2021) is expected to be South of that. The deficit for 2021 was about $3 Trillion.
Let's say FY22 is $6 Trillion (what Biden is asking for), then approx. $5 Trillion is spent on everything else. The point is that if we are going to balance the budget, we'll have to cut Defense, Everything Else, and Raise Taxes. There's 2 out 3 that will kil
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$10 billion is 0.012 percent of one yearly budget.
Basic math fail... 10/778 = 1/77.8 is clearly more than 1/100, so more than 1% . You forgot to multiply by 100 to get to percent...
But I don't disagree that the military still wastes a lot of money.
I really wish.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oblig XKCD quote... (Score:2)
Build 2 or 3 of them (Score:2)
I guess whoever runs these science programmes is has a Vegas gambler personality, or is just not a ra
Oh, mr innocent, you thought this was a telescope. (Score:1)
It's actually a jobs program for a small elite group of scientists. Like most of these Cadillac science probes, this thing is intended to be the careers of a bunch of people - they write a proposal, then plan and build a probe, get it launched, then manage it until it wears out (and they retire). If they built TWO of the item, it would deprive another group of younger colleagues of THEIR careers designing building launching and managing a single space probe...
Back when this stuff was NOT about making a care
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Damn if the the space telescope goes boom... (Score:1)
a million miles on the other side of the moon (Score:1)
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> it's the sun-earth L2 point
This is the most useful comment.
I guess manned repair missions are out with current tech.
Twenty bucks (Score:2)
Twenty bucks says Elon Musk makes a silly comment about this launch. Seem more likely to make me money than dogecoins.