The CDC recently issued an alert to healthcare providers about enterovirus D68, which has turned up in children who were hospitalized with severe respiratory illnesses. This virus can also cause a form of paralysis known as acute flaccid myelitis. Most illnesses with this virus do not cause the paralysis, but it’s good for providers to have this on their radar. So what does that mean for you as a parent?
What is enterovirus D68?
This virus is an enterovirus, in the same family as polio. (In fact, there are a whole group of these “non-polio enteroviruses.”) Enteroviruses spend part of their time in the intestine, hence the name, but they can also cause respiratory symptoms like runny nose, sneezing, and coughs. Some of the recent cases of EV-D68 have involved severe respiratory symptoms, especially in children with a history of asthma or wheezing.
EV-D68 is one of the viruses that has been linked to acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), which was described as a polio-like paralysis during its first big wave in 2014. There have since been surges in the late summer and early fall of 2016, 2018, and 2020, and it seems to be continuing the pattern this year.
What is acute flaccid myelitis?
Myelitis is an inflammation of the spinal cord that can cause weakness and paralysis. “Acute” means it comes on suddenly, and “flaccid” means that the affected body part may appear floppy. (That’s to distinguish it from other forms of paralysis in which the muscle can cramp or twitch.)
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Symptoms of AFM can include weakness in an arm or leg, but other body parts can be affected, including drooping eyelids, slurred speech, or difficulty swallowing. The CDC calls AFM “rare but serious.” If your child has any of these symptoms, make sure to seek medical care.
What should parents know?
It’s important to remember that this virus is not super common, and AFM is even rarer. In short: don’t panic.
Fortunately, the ways to protect yourself and your child from this virus are the same things you should already be doing to reduce your risk of getting colds, flu, COVID, stomach bugs, and other common illnesses. The CDC has an informational poster for parents, which advises the following:
Avoid close contact with sick people
Cover your coughs and sneezes
Wash your hands often with soap and water
Clean and disinfect surfaces
Avoid touching your face with unwashed hands
Stay home when you’re sick
There is no vaccine for EV-D68, but the CDC still advises staying up-to-date on vaccines to protect yourself from other illnesses that can cause similar symptoms, including polio and the flu.
If your child has asthma, the CDC recommends making sure they have an updated asthma action plan that specifies what medications and precautions to take depending on how much their asthma is bothering them. And, as always, seek immediate medical care if they have trouble breathing.
A virus that can rarely cause a polio-like paralysis in children has resurfaced in the U.S. after mostly disappearing during the covid-19 pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that it has spotted a surge of cases linked to enterovirus D-68. Based on recent past outbreaks, officials expect that a small percentage of these cases will develop a serious neurological condition known as acute flaccid myelitis.
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Over the weekend, the CDC issued a health advisory concerning EV-D68. Since August 2022, doctors and hospitals in several parts of the country have notified the agency of an increase of severe respiratory illness cases and hospitalizations among children caused by two groups of viruses: rhinoviruses and enteroviruses. Further testing has shown that some of these cases were caused by EV-D68, and the CDC’s own surveillance data has shown a higher proportion of respiratory illnesses tied to the virus this summer compared to the past three years.
EV-D68 is one of many viruses that usually cause a mild common cold, mostly in children. However, it’s become apparent in recent years that the infection can sometimes trigger AFM. The virus is a cousin of the poliovirus, which has long been known to cause a similar paralytic condition in about 0.1% of victims. And it’s suspected that EV-D68 has recently mutated in some way that makes it more similar to polio and thus more likely to cause AFM, though it is still a rare complication.
The primary symptoms of AFM are sudden limb weakness, and some will also experience facial weakness, slurred speech, and pain along their limbs and back. In the most severe cases, people can develop a life-threatening paralysis that causes respiratory failure, while others may develop permanent paralysis.
There are probably several causes of AFM, including other enteroviruses, but the spike in cases seen since at least 2014 is closely connected to outbreaks of EV-D68 in particular. These outbreaks of EV-D68 and AFM had occurred every two years on schedule during the past decade, likely as a result of population immunity falling low enough for large groups of children to catch it all at once. But this pattern, which would have predicted another AFM outbreak in 2020, changed once the covid-19 pandemic arrived.
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While mostly everyone has contracted covid-19 by now, much of the world took precautions during the first years of the pandemic to avoid unnecessary social and physical contact. These efforts may have only slowed down the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus, but they were more effective at curbing the transmission of many other, less-contagious infections, EV-D68 included. It’s only recently that many garden variety germs have begun to storm back in frequency, and experts have warned that EV-D68 would eventually follow suit as well. The virus tends to be seasonal, arriving in the summer, just as it has now.
There have been nearly 700 confirmed cases of AFM documented by the CDC since 2014, when the agency began formally tracking it. During past outbreak years, there were around 150 to 200 cases of AFM. So far, only 13 cases have been reported in 2022. But the condition typically appears weeks after the initial symptoms of a common cold, and past outbreaks of AFM have similarly followed outbreaks of EV-D68. In its advisory, the CDC calls for doctors to be on the lookout for the condition and notes that “increased vigilance for AFM in the coming weeks will be essential.”
The actual poliovirus has made something of an unwelcome return in the U.S. this summer. In July, a young New York resident developed paralytic polio, and the virus has since been found in the state’s wastewater, indicating the potential for further spread. The virus may not spread very far, thanks to a highly effective vaccine and a high vaccination rate (over 92% nationwide), but it remains a danger to the unvaccinated, and its return could imperil the global effort to eradicate polio as a human disease.
Long before Webb even launched from French Guiana, we’ve been waiting for this moment: the first full-color images from this cutting-edge space telescope. NASA announced yesterday that those pictures will be available on July 12, along with some spectroscopic data.
“The release of Webb’s first full-color images will offer a unique moment for us all to stop and marvel at a view humanity has never seen before,” said Eric Smith, a Webb program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a NASA release.
Webb launched on December 25 and arrived at its observation point in space—a place called L2, a million miles from Earth—one month later. Since then, NASA scientists (as well as scientists at the European and Canadian space agencies, who are partners on the telescope mission) have been hard at work preparing the machine to do science.
The telescope’s primary science goals are to study the birth of stars and the rise of planetary systems, to learn about the evolution of galaxies and local objects like exoplanets, and to investigate the earliest sources of light in the universe—the very first stars and galaxies.
“Our goals for Webb’s first images and data are both to showcase the telescope’s powerful instruments and to preview the science mission to come,” said astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in the same release. “They are sure to deliver a long-awaited ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public.”
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NASA has been tight-lipped about what Webb’s first color images will show, though we got a clue last month, when the agency released some remarkable shots of the Large Magellanic Cloud taken by Webb’s MIRI instrument and held a briefing on what is to come. From that press conference, we know that the images (called “early release observations”) will be of Webb science targets. But the exact subjects will remain a “surprise” until the images are released in July, Pontoppidan said last month.
The first images are only a month away, but many will follow thereafter. Only planned to last five years, the Webb mission may go for as long as 20 years, thanks to fuel saved during an ultra-precise launch.
More: NASA Releases Ridiculously Sharp Webb Space Telescope Images
Images from the Webb Telescope’s instrument suite of focused stars indicate that the mirrors are fully aligned.Image: NASA/STScI
The Webb Space Telescope is one step closer to being fully operational: It is now fully aligned and calibrating its suite of four instruments to collect data on our universe. NASA announced the new milestone in a blog post yesterday.
Webb, a collaboration between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency, is humanity’s newest attempt at unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. The aim of the telescope is to collect data on potentially habitable exoplanets, as well as to observe distant stars and fledgling galaxies in infrared using its golden honeycomb array. Now, its seventh and final stage of alignment is officially complete after its launch back in December 2021, and it has some amazing photos from each of its four instruments to prove it.
“These remarkable test images from a successfully aligned telescope demonstrate what people across countries and continents can achieve when there is a bold scientific vision to explore the universe,” said Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in the NASA blog post.
Now that the mirrors are fully aligned, the telescope is successfully supplying its four instruments with incoming light from the far reaches of the universe, capturing images of stars in sharp focus. The instruments are the NIRCam, a near-infrared camera for imaging young stars and forming galaxies; the NIRSpec, a powerful spectrograph to study light from distant sources; MIRI, a camera and spectrograph that operate in the mid-infrared wavelengths; and FGI/NIRISS, which allows the telescope to aim with precision and study exoplanets.
Webb is now moving into the process of instrument commissioning, where these incredibly sensitive instruments will be tested across different configurations to ensure they are ready for full-scale operation. As a part of this process, the telescope will point at different patches of the sky to ensure that it’s thermally stable. Instrument commissioning should take around two months, and the official start of the science mission should finally begin this summer.
Artist’s conception of the fully deployed James Webb Space Telescope. Image: NASA
The left wing of Webb’s primary mirror unfolded and locked into position on Saturday, in what was the final step of the major deployments phase. The space telescope finally looks like a telescope, but the commissioning phase is far from over.
Ground controllers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore declared the primary mirror complete at 1:17 p.m. EST on Saturday, January 8, having started with the left wing deployment some four hours earlier. The team moved the right wing into position on Friday. The primary mirror, at 21 feet (6.4 meters) wide, is now the largest mirror ever sent into space, with a collecting area more than six times that of Hubble’s mirror. The telescope had to be folded tight to make it fit inside the payload fairing of an Ariane 5 rocket, and assembling it in orbit was deemed unfeasible.
So with the primary mirror, as well as the secondary mirror, radiator, sunshield, and solar panel, securely in place, all major deployments have been wrapped up, and with no serious glitches or hurdles to speak of. Launched to space on Christmas Day, Webb is a joint effort involving NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency.
“The successful completion of all of the Webb Space Telescope’s deployments is historic,” Gregory Robinson, Webb program director at NASA, said in a press 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.”
I’m not one for hyperbole, but Robinson’s high praise is fully warranted. Webb is the most complicated and powerful space telescope ever sent into space, having as many as 344 potential points of failure—the vast majority of which have now been retired.
“The James Webb Space Telescope is an unprecedented mission that is on the precipice of seeing the light from the first galaxies and discovering the mysteries of our universe,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson. “Each feat already achieved and future accomplishment is a testament to the thousands of innovators who poured their life’s passion into this mission.”
The primary mirror has been deployed, but it’s far from ready to go. All 18 of its hexagonal segments now need to be aligned, in a meticulous process that’s expected to take 10 days. The primary mirror is meant to function as a single concave mirror, requiring all 18 gold-plated segments to redirect incoming light to a single focal point, namely the secondary mirror positioned in front of the telescope. Mission controllers will align all mirrors into precise positions using 126 actuators.
In addition to this, they’ll need to perform a third course correction to steer the observatory to its workspace: the second Lagrange point. From this spot, located some 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, Webb will use its infrared capabilities to study ancient galaxies, our solar system, and distant exoplanets. The third and final course correction is scheduled for Sunday, January 23.
It’ll be around this time that NASA will power-up Webb’s scientific instruments. Assuming that goes well, the remaining five months of commissioning will be about aligning the optics and calibrating the instruments. The science phase of the mission is expected to start this coming summer and last for some 20 years, according to new fuel estimates. Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, is still operating today after more than 30 years in space—so there’s reason to be hopeful that Webb will outlive its initially planned lifespan of only five and a half years.
More: Webb Space Telescope Got a Lucky Boost From Its Christmas Launch.
The Webb Space Telescope launches from French Guiana on December 25.Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA (Getty Images)
When the Webb Space Telescope successfully launched from Earth on Saturday, most everyone was just relieved that it didn’t blow up in the process. But now there’s even better news: The launch was precise enough that the spacecraft may have enough propellant to continue its scientific operations for longer than planned.
Webb will take images of some of the oldest light in the universe, as well as nearer objects like exoplanets. The telescope lifted off from a European Space Agency launchpad in French Guiana on December 25 and is currently over 360,000 miles from Earth, traveling away from us at a speed of half-a-mile per second. Webb is now about 40% of the way to its final destination, a place called Lagrange point 2. L2 is a point in space that naturally allows spacecraft to use minimal amounts of fuel to stay in a stable position relative to Earth and the Sun.
According to a new ESA release, the launch of Webb was so precisely aimed at L2 that less fuel than expected will be needed to correct the telescope’s course the rest of the way. Webb has so far used rocket propellant to correct its course twice and will burn more to get into orbit at L2.
Once the spacecraft is in position, it will occasionally use fuel to maintain its position and orientation in space, as well as to turn to peer at specific regions of space. The minimum baseline for the Webb mission was five years, but the recent analysis of the launch indicated that Webb may be able to conduct operations at L2 for over a decade.
Parallels could be drawn to the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched from Earth in 1990 and has given humanity a remarkable 30 years of observations. Though the telescope has stuttered, especially recently, it is a testament to human engineering that the spacecraft has lasted as long as it has. Here’s hoping we’ll be able to say the same for Webb.
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More: Here’s What’s Next For the Webb Space Telescope As It Hurtles Towards Deep Space
Conceptual image showing the launch of the Webb telescope, with the fairing falling away. Image: ESA/D. Ducros
The Webb Space Telescope, after years of delays, has finally reached the launch pad. It’s a momentous occasion, but the observatory still needs to go through a complex and unprecedented commissioning process that will require a nerve-wracking six months to complete. The hard part, it would seem, is still to come.
Developed by the American, European, and Canadian space agencies, and with help from private contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Webb has been described as the “most complex and powerful telescope ever built.” With its infrared capabilities, Webb will hunt for ancient stars and galaxies, study the formation of stars and exoplanets, and search for life in the Milky Way. The space telescope has the potential to literally and figuratively transform our view of the cosmos and our understanding of our place in it.
Excitement for this mission is accentuated by the fact that Webb was supposed to go up in 2007, but a major redesign having to do with its sunshield, cost overruns that nearly doubled the original quote, ongoing technical hurdles, extensive testing, issues with the chosen launch vehicle—pauses to catch breath—the covid-19 pandemic, and problems during processing at the Guiana Space Center all conspired to create the current launch date of December 25, 2021 (liftoff is currently scheduled for between 7:20 and 7:52 a.m. EST on Christmas Day).
Broad overview of the six-month commissioning phase. Graphic: NASA
The heavy lifting, so to speak, seems to be behind us, but plenty of steps remain before Webb can be declared fully operational. Now, I can’t possibly account for everything that could possibly go wrong from now until then, but I can go over some key stages, and even some technological gadgetry, that could create problems over the next six months.
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Before we get to that, however, I want to talk about the Ariane 5 rocket that will take Webb to space. The Arianespace rocket is super reliable, but a prior technical issue is making me a little nervous about the upcoming launch. On two separate occasions in 2020, the Ariane 5 rocket experienced unexpected vehicle accelerations during fairing separation. Arianespace has since corrected the issue, and everything seems good to go, but I don’t love that this happened. This will make me a little extra nervous on Christmas morning as I sip on my eggnog and watch the launch.
A catastrophic rocket failure notwithstanding (heaven forbid), the launch could produce damaging vibrations. That said, Webb is specifically designed to tolerate the expected shaking. Back in 2016, vibrations testing revealed a problem with the tie-downs, or “launch restraint mechanisms,” that will hold the telescope’s mirror wings. The many acoustic and vibration tests done on the 14,300-pound instrument should have ruled this out, among other potential problems, but we won’t know until Webb finally gets to space.
As Alison Nordt, Lockheed Martin space science and instrumentation director, explained in an email, Webb doesn’t just have to survive launch—it also needs to survive its rude introduction to space.
“I am of course very excited for the JWST launch, and the stakes are definitely high,” said Nordt. “The space environment, including launch, presents many differences from the ground—things like launch loads (vibration and acoustics), vacuum (lack of air), temperature extremes (especially for Webb going to about -400°F), and weightlessness,” which can’t necessarily be tested on the ground.
The launch sequence itself should be a routine affair, with the Ariane’s side boosters falling away a few minutes after blast off, followed by the jettisoning of the payload fairing. The rocket’s lower stage will continue to provide the needed thrust, but once out of fuel it too will need to fall away, allowing the upper stage to take over. The spacecraft must then perform a series of oscillation maneuvers to prevent solar radiation from blasting a single side of the now-exposed telescope. The upper stage will be jettisoned around 27 minutes after launch, at which time Webb will be independent and under its own power.
Launches always involve an element of risk, but in this case, it’s all the stuff that will happen next that could create the biggest problems. With more folds than an origami paper sculpture, the space telescope must open up, give out a metaphorical yawn, and unfurl its many components.
The spacecraft will deploy its solar panels around 33 minutes into the mission “so that Webb can start making electricity from sunshine and stop draining its battery,” as NASA writes in the Webb FAQ. “Webb will quickly establish its ability to orient itself and ‘fly’ in space.” Webb’s high gain antenna will be deployed at this time as well, in order to “enable the highest available rates of data communication as early as practical,” according to NASA.
Graphic showing Webb’s location in the second Lagrange point (not to scale). Graphic: NASA
Deploying the solar arrays will be a time-sensitive affair, but so too will be the first trajectory correction. Unlike Hubble, which works in low Earth orbit, Webb will conduct its business in the second Lagrange point, or L2. This sweet spot, situated between Earth and the Sun, is highly stable, which means Webb won’t have to use an excessive amount of fuel to stay in position. L2 is located around 1 million miles (1.5 million km) from Earth, so it will take Webb a full month to get there, during which time the spacecraft will need to make some course corrections. The first, known as MCC-1a, will happen some 12.5 hours into the mission.
Webb’s first day in space sounds intense, but the following weeks and months will likewise involve some very important steps, any one of which could jeopardize the mission, as SpaceNews explains:
Those initial deployments, though, are among the most critical, and the riskiest. At a November briefing, Mike Menzel, JWST lead mission systems engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said there are 344 single-point failures in the spacecraft, 80% of which are associated with deployment mechanisms. “When you have a release mechanism, it’s hard to put full redundancy into that,” he said.
The sunshield, for example, includes 140 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, about 400 pulleys and 90 cables that are a total of 400 meters long, said Krystal Puga, JWST spacecraft systems engineer at Northrop Grumman, during that November briefing.
The process of deploying the telescope’s five-layer sunshield will begin three days after launch. Being an infrared telescope, Webb needs this shield to minimize potential interference; the telescope is designed to detect sources of heat, so the last thing scientists need is to be picking up heat coming off its own instruments. In the week following launch, “the most critical operations will be all the sunshield deployments and tensioning of the layers,” Nordt told Gizmodo. “The sunshield deployment is causing the most discussion in part because it was the hardest system to test-like-you-fly.” Other deployments, like the rolling out of Webb’s radiators, will take place at the same time.
By week two, the team should be wrapping up the deployments, including the unfolding and latching of the secondary mirror tripod, the rotating and latching of the two primary mirror wings, and the unlocking of the primary mirror segments. Full deployment of the telescope should be completed around 13 days into the mission. The effects of the sunshade should start to become apparent around this time, with the scientific instruments undergoing rapid cooling.
“The Webb team has done everything they possibly could to test everything to ensure success, and I know we will all breathe a bit easier once all the deployments are complete and we can move on to alignments,” said Nordt.
Webb’s four science instruments. Graphic: NASA
The end of the first month will involve one final course correction (on day 29) and the insertion of Webb into its L2 orbit. Excitingly, controllers will then power up the observatory’s four scientific instruments: the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), and the Fine Guidance Sensor/Near InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (FGS-NIRISS).
“Once all those deployments are complete, the next step in commissioning is the one I am personally most excited for: turning on the NIRCam to start the meticulous process of aligning the 18 primary mirror segments,” said Nordt.
To start this process of fine-tuning the mirrors, “126 extremely precise actuators on the backside of the mirrors will position and subtly bend or flex each mirror into a specific prescription, a process that will take months,” NASA says. NIRCam can sense distortions in incoming light with great precision, said Nordt, and this data will allow the team in control of the individual mirror segments to “translate, rotate and change their curvature accordingly.” By the end of this alignment process, the 18 individual segments will serve as a single primary mirror. “So as you can imagine, those measurements from NIRCam have to be exactly correct in order for all this to work,” Nordt explained.
These initial optics checkouts and telescope alignments will happen during months two through four. Months five and six will involve final calibrations and the completion of the commissioning process. Webb will conduct observations of representative targets to help with the calibrations, and early demonstrations will test the observatory’s ability to track objects such as asteroids, comets, and moons. The team will then prepare a preliminary report, the Early Release Observations, to showcase the telescope’s abilities. Only after this is done will the official science operations phase begin.
Webb should remain functional for a minimum of five years, but the expectation is that it will work for at least 10 and possibly 12. Over those years, the telescope will have to perform slight engine bursts to keep it in L2, but the fuel required for these adjustments will eventually run out, after which time the telescope will just drift away, effectively ending the science stage of the mission.
With no feasible way to repair the telescope should something go wrong, and potentially 10 years of scientific breakthroughs in the balance, we’ll be on the edge of our seats this Christmas morning. The next decade will be a busy one for Webb and the many astronomers planning to use it. For all this to happen however, the stars, it would seem, will need to come into perfect alignment.
Astronomers, scientists, and space-hobbyists all over the world are nervously chewing their nails this holiday season over the Christmas Day launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. If all goes according to plan, liftoff will take place on Dec. 25 at 7:20 a.m. ET. If you’re in French Guiana, you can watch the launch live at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou. If you’re not, you can check out NASA’s livestream.
What is the James Webb Space Telescope?
The James Webb telescope is the biggest, most complex telescope that NASA has ever launched into space, a mission on-par in importance and complexity with the Apollo missions and the launch of the space shuttle. In development since 1996, the telescope is the next-generation successor to the Hubble space telescope. Its huge golden mirror will allow us to see further into space and further back in time than we ever have before.
“Twenty-nine days on the edge”
In a video, NASA dubbed the launch and deployment phase of the Webb mission 29 Days on the Edge. It’s easy to see why: The plan for deployment of the telescope is audacious and fraught with possible disaster. Right now, the telescope’s 21-foot diameter mirror, made of gold-plated beryllium, and its five-layer heat-shield the size of three tennis courts are folded and crammed into a tiny, 5.4-meter diameter rocket faring sitting on a launch pad in South America. Weather permitting, it will be shot into space on Christmas, and once outside the Earth’s atmosphere, the mirror, heat shield, and instruments will unfold and assemble themselves into a telescope during a 30-day journey to a spot a million miles away from our planet.
The first hurdle is the actual trip off Earth—a rocket malfunction is unlikely, but could obliterate the ten billion dollar project in an instant—but the real drama will come after the telescope is deposited in space, when hundreds of systems must perform perfectly for the telescope to self-assemble and cruise to its destination.
“We’ll have our 29 days of terror as we’re watching things being deployed,” astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz told NPR.
“I have images in my head of a half-unfolded mirror stuck in place, which would be very bad, something like what happened to the Galileo spacecraft with its main antenna getting stuck during the fold-out process,” Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science said.
If something does go wrong, there won’t be much we can do to correct. The Hubble telescope, deployed in 1990, had problems with its mirror, but it was in a low-Earth orbit, so astronauts were able to service the satellite and patch the mirror problem. When a telescope is a million miles away from us, no one is going to be able to correct anything, at least not directly.
Looking beyond time itself
If everything goes according to plan, the telescope will be operational in about six months, and that’s when things get interesting. The Webb’s beryllium mirror is designed to capture infrared light emitted by distant planets and galaxies, allowing us to see as far back in time as it’s possible to see luminous objects. We’ll be able to look at the formation of the first galaxies created by the Big Bang, and learn about the role dark matter may have played in the formation of the Universe.
The Webb telescope will also scan the atmospheres of distant planets for the building blocks of life, hopefully identifying habitable worlds and/or telling us where all the flying saucers are coming from.
Maybe the most exciting discoveries from the Webb will be the ones we can’t possibly predict. The deeper view of space provided by the telescope’s equipment could reveal some aspect of space or time we’d have had no way of knowing about before, potentially creating entirely new fields of scientific study. Depending, of course, on the thing getting into space without blowing up.
The Webb space telescope being hoisted to the top of an Ariane 5 rocket. Photo: ESA/M. Pedoussaut
Another day, another problem with the Webb Space Telescope. The new delay has to do with a communications issue, which we can only hope is not serious.
NASA’s latest update to the Webb launch situation was clear, concise, and grammatically incorrect. “The James Webb Space Telescope team is working a communication issue between the observatory and the launch vehicle system,” the space agency posted to its Webb telescope blog. “This will delay the launch date to no earlier than Friday, Dec. 24. We will provide more information about the new launch date no later than Friday, Dec. 17.”
That’s a delay of two days, as the highly anticipated (and anxiety-provoking) space observatory had been scheduled for launch on December 22. A two-day delay doesn’t sound serious, but because no further details were given, it’s hard to know.
In November, a processing incident at a satellite preparation facility in Kourou, French Guiana, caused a vibration to course through the entire $10 billion telescope, resulting in a four-day delay. The incident happened as Arianespace technicians were preparing to mount Webb to the launch vehicle adapter. A NASA-led investigation found no lingering issues and declared the observatory “ready for flight.”
Good progress has been made since then. The telescope has been fueled up, transported to the final assembly building at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, and placed atop the Ariane 5 rocket that will take it to space. As the Webb blog noted on December 14, the telescope “was slowly hoisted nearly 130 feet [40 meters] and then perfectly aligned on top of the Ariane 5, after which technicians bolted Webb’s launch vehicle adapter down to the rocket.”
A successor to the still-active-but-struggling Hubble Space Telescope, Webb will use its infrared capabilities to study distant planets, stars, and some of the most ancient galaxies in the universe.
The incident with the vibration and now the communications issue are just two of many problems to afflict the project over the years. Webb, a collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency, was supposed to launch years ago, but ongoing technical challenges, the covid-19 pandemic, and other issues have resulted in a seemingly endless succession of delays.
The current year alone has seen multiple delays, as the observatory was supposed to launch in March, October, and November—including October 31. I suppose the new target date of Christmas Eve is far less ominous than a Halloween launch.
The Webb space telescope inside the payload preparation facility at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on on Nov. 26, 2021.Photo: ESA/CNES/Arianespace
Wearing protective suits to guard against toxic chemicals, a small team of mission specialists has completed the 10-day fueling of the upcoming Webb space telescope. For what seems like the first time ever, the long-delayed mission is actually starting to feel real.
Fueling was completed on December 3 at the payload preparation facility at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, according to a European Space Agency press release. It’s a major milestone, as all that’s left is for mission specialists to mount the telescope atop an Ariane 5 rocket, make some final adjustments, and then roll it out to the launch pad.
At the risk of jinxing this international project, things are finally starting to feel a bit normal. The project has been beset by problems, so the fueling, because it happened without incident, seems like a small victory unto itself. And in fact, fueling was only allowed to happen after NASA investigators determined that Webb wasn’t damaged during a processing incident that caused a vibration to course through the entire structure.
The specialists who performed the fueling had to wear Self-Contained Atmospheric Protective Ensemble (SCAPE) suits, to protect them from the very toxic propellants: dinitrogen tetroxide oxidizer and hydrazine.
Webb is a telescope, but it’s also a spacecraft. The next-gen observatory, built by NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency, will need propellant to make important course-corrections following separation from the Ariane 5 rocket. Unlike its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb will not perform its work in low Earth orbit. The sensitive infrared telescope needs a super-cold environment, so it’s being sent some 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) to the second Lagrange point, or L2. This special orbit around the Sun will keep Webb cold and in line with Earth. A sunshield will protect its instruments from excessive light and heat.
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Webb will also need propellant for conducting normal operations, such as repointing the observatory and managing its momentum in space. Webb will finally get to work approximately six months after launch, at which time we’ll finally witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle station, er, infrared telescope. Like Hubble, Webb will perform sweeping observations of the solar system, Milky Way, and distant galaxies, but it will be far more powerful and likely to reveal hidden details, such as the oldest galaxies in the universe and the atmospheric composition of far-away exoplanets.
The next step is to place Webb on top of Ariane 5 and secure it within the rocket’s faring. From there, the rocket will be transported to the Final Assembly Building for the final tweaks needed before launch. We’re only weeks away now, and soon it’ll be just a few days, then hours, and finally minutes. Seems unreal, but we honestly won’t believe anything until we see this rocket headed skywards.
More: Chinese Rover to Investigate ‘Mysterious Hut’ Spotted on Far Side of Moon.
