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posted by janrinok on Sunday January 09 2022, @11:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the cool! dept.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Successfully Unfolds its Massive Mirror

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope successfully unfolds its massive mirror:

The team behind the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope successfully finished unfolding the instrument's distinctive golden mirror on Saturday, meaning the telescope is now fully deployed and is one step closer to sending back data about the universe's first galaxies.

"The successful completion of all of the Webb Space Telescope's deployments is historic," Webb's program director at NASA Headquarters, Gregory L. Robinson, said in a release. "This is the first time a NASA-led mission has ever attempted to complete a complex sequence to unfold an observatory in space – a remarkable feat for our team, NASA, and the world."

NASA and its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, began remotely unfolding the two wings of Webb's primary mirror on Friday and completed the task at about 10:15 a.m. PT Saturday, when the second wing latched into place.

Over the next six months, Webb is set to travel 1 million miles from Earth and begin sending back images of the universe that promise to serve up a new, unfiltered story of the cosmos. Not only will Webb teach us about hidden regions of space, it also has the power to prove whether we've correctly documented the events that happened right after the Big Bang.

Remarkably, NASA Has Completed Deployment of the Webb Space Telescope

Remarkably, NASA has completed deployment of the Webb space telescope:

But now that ultra complex heat shield is working. The temperature on the Sun-facing side of the telescope is 55 degrees Celsius [(131 °F)], or a very, very, very hot day in the Sahara desert . And already, the science instruments on the back side of the sunshield have cooled to -199 degrees Celsius[(-326.2 °F)], a temperature at which nitrogen is a liquid. They will yet cool further.

Work remains, of course. Webb still must traverse about 370,000 km to reach an orbit around a stable Lagrange point, L2. Scientists and engineers must check out and align the 18 primary mirror segments. Scientific instruments must be calibrated. But all of this work is somewhat more routine when it comes to science spacecraft. There are risks, to be sure, but these are mostly known risks.

We can therefore be reasonably confident now that Webb will, in fact, begin to make science observations this summer. We should, truly, be in awe.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday January 10 2022, @06:49AM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 10 2022, @06:49AM (#1211442) Journal

    Opportunity cost is a very stupid, Republican neo-liberal economic argument.

    It whips your argument soundly - that informs me that your argument was worse than very stupid.

    There is no opportunity cost, if nothing besides JWST was funded.

    "If". There's similarly then no opportunity cost, if nothing besides a little token research and the glorious khallow pampering fund are funded. You have to acknowledge that choice exists first before you can understand the point of opportunity cost. Economics fundamentally is about the value (as we perceive it) of the choices we make. If we refuse to acknowledge such choices, we end up accepting very horrendous decisions like the present course of the JWST.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by aristarchus on Monday January 10 2022, @06:56AM (3 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Monday January 10 2022, @06:56AM (#1211443) Journal

    Stick to small-scale earth-moving equipment, khallow, it is more your "speed".

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 10 2022, @06:58AM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 10 2022, @06:58AM (#1211444) Journal
      And yet I'm not the one with the cognitive dissonance and the treadless arguments.
      • (Score: 0, Troll) by aristarchus on Monday January 10 2022, @08:05AM (1 child)

        by aristarchus (2645) on Monday January 10 2022, @08:05AM (#1211456) Journal

        Are you so sure? Certainly your backhoes are treadless, at least the ones you offered for rental to me!