How to Watch the Launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (and Why It Matters)
Astronomers, scientists and space lovers around the world are nervously nail-biting this holiday season due to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope on Christmas Day. If all goes according to plan, it will start on December 25 at 7:20 am ET. If you’re in French Guiana, you can watch the launch live at the Kourou Guiana Space Center. If not, you can watch NASA’s live stream .
What is the James Webb Space Telescope?
The James Webb Telescope is the largest and most sophisticated telescope NASA has ever launched into space, a mission that rivals the importance and complexity of the Apollo missions and the space shuttle launch. Developed since 1996, the telescope is the next generation of the Hubble Space Telescope. Its huge golden mirror will allow us to look further into space and back in time than ever before.
“Twenty-nine days on the brink”
In the video, NASA dubbed the launch and deployment phase of Webb’s29 Days on the Brink . It’s easy to see why: the telescope’s deployment plan is daring and fraught with potential disaster. Right now, the telescope mirror, 21 feet in diameter, made of gilded beryllium, and its five-layer heat shield the size of three tennis courts, are folded and squeezed into a tiny 5.4-meter rocket at launch. Pad in South America. Weather permitting, it will be launched into space on Christmas Day, and beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the mirror, heat shield and instruments will unfold and assembled in a telescope on a 30-day journey to a point a million miles from our planet. planet.
The first obstacle is the actual flight from Earth – a rocket malfunction is unlikely, but could instantly negate the $ 10 billion project – but the real drama will happen after the telescope is sent into space, when hundreds of systems are supposed to work flawlessly. assemble the telescope yourself and go to your destination.
“We will have 29 days of horror as we watch the deployment, ” astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz told NPR .
“I have images in my head of a half-unfolded mirror stuck, which would be very bad, something like what happened to the Galileo spacecraft when its main antenna got stuck during the unfolding process.” – Scott Sheppard of Carnegie. The Science Institute said .
If something goes wrong, there is little we can do to fix it. The Hubble Telescope, deployed in 1990, had problems with the mirror, but it was in low Earth orbit, so the astronauts were able to service the satellite and fix the mirror problem. When the telescope is a million miles away, no one can fix anything, at least not directly.
Looking beyond time itself
If everything goes according to plan, the telescope will start working in about six months, and then things will get more interesting. Webb’s beryllium mirror is designed to capture infrared light emitted from distant planets and galaxies, allowing us to see as far back in time as possible to see luminous objects. We can take a look at the formation of the first galaxies created by the Big Bang and learn about the role that dark matter may have played in the formation of the universe.
The Webb Telescope will also scan the atmospheres of distant planets in search of the building blocks of life, hopefully identifying habitable worlds and / or telling us where all the flying saucers came from.
Perhaps the most exciting discoveries made by Webb will be those that we cannot predict. The deeper look at space provided by telescope equipment could reveal some aspects of space or time that we might not have known about before, potentially creating entirely new areas of scientific research. Depends, of course, on the fact that the thing gets into space without an explosion.