The Webb Space Telescope completed its complex mirror deployment this week, and the observatory is getting tantalizingly close to completing its journey to L2, where it will orbit the Sun a million miles away from Earth.
Webb is traveling to the second Lagrange point, a position in space that will allow the telescope to use minimal fuel to stay in position. From L2, the telescope will observe the early universe and exoplanets in the infrared and near-infrared wavelengths. The telescope is expected to overhaul our understanding of the universe’s birth and evolution, as it will peer farther back in time than the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s predecessor, which was launched in 1990.
Webb rocketed to space on December 25 from French Guiana and has since traversed 860,000 miles. During this journey, the telescope been steadily unfurling; to make it practical to launch, engineers had to fold it up like a caterpillar in a chrysalis. In careful steps, it has unfurled its sunshield and deployed its mirrors, with the latter step fully completed this week.
Webb has 18 primary mirror segments (the primary mirror is the big honeycomb structure that stands perpendicular to the sunshield) and a secondary mirror; the mirror segments are adjustable and had to be individually shifted from their launch configuration to their positions for scientific observations. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson confirmed the completed mirror deployment on Wednesday.
Tiny incremental adjustments to the mirror positions will happen over the next several months to get everything into the right optical alignments for observation, according to the Webb deployment schedule. But now that deployment is done, only one major step remains: the fuel burn to insert the telescope at L2. This is the final fuel burn by Webb during its deployment schedule, though future burns will happen occasionally to correct the telescope’s orbit.
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The telescope should be orbiting L2 by January 23, after which it will have five months of commissioning to prepare it for scientific observations. The telescope’s million-mile journey is just the preamble to a brilliant scientific career, which could last some 20 years.
More: New Video Shows Webb Space Telescope’s Goodbye to Earth
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.
Astronomers looking over data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) recently came across something weird: an object called TIC 400799224 has been fluctuating in brightness, like a star being routinely eclipsed. Their analysis of the observations suggests that TIC 400799224 is actually two stars, one of which is being orbited by a mystery object. The researchers suspect that a large asteroid or perhaps even a small planet is releasing dust clouds that dim the starlight from TESS’s perspective.
Launched in 2018, TESS is tasked with finding exoplanets—worlds beyond our solar system—that pass in front of their host stars, causing detectable dips in the star’s brightness. So far, TESS has discovered 172 exoplanets, and 4,703 candidate exoplanets await more analysis. These alien worlds help planetary scientists understand the demography of the universe and the diversity of planets that exist.
TIC 400799224 appears to be a stellar binary, or two stars orbiting one another. The stars are thought to be about 300 AU apart, according to the paper, with 1 AU being the average distance between Earth and the Sun. The research team is still not sure which star hosts the mystery object that causes the brightness dips. The dimming happens about every 19.77 days, but the length, intensity, and shape of the dips vary a lot.
The periodicity of the dimming is what leads the team to believe it’s caused by an orbiting object, though the dips don’t happen with every transit, so the team thinks the most likely culprit is a sporadically emitted dust cloud. Their research is published in The Astronomical Journal.
What makes TIC 400799224 particularly odd is that the suspected dust clouds are larger than researchers would expect, assuming that the clouds are due to the object’s disintegration over time. As a Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian press release notes, slow disintegration is the cause of the dust clouds that come off Ceres, a dwarf planet in our solar system.
Other suspected disintegrating objects have also been found, so TIC 400799224 has some precedent. The researchers will continue to study the system and review historical records of TIC 400799224’s brightness, in hopes of better understanding what’s going on out there.
More: Very Large Telescope Images 42 of the Biggest Asteroids in Our Solar System
Animation showing the deployment of the secondary mirror tripod. Gif: NASA/Gizmodo
The James Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed the tripod that holds the observatory’s secondary mirror, in what is a critical milestone for the mission.
Webb launched on Christmas Day, but a lot has already happened, including the successful deployments of the observatory’s solar array and five-layer sunshield, the latter of which was completed just yesterday. Today, the Webb team shifted its focus to the secondary mirror, in what is the first in a series of deployments having to do with Webb’s optics.
The secondary mirror, measuring 2.4 feet (0.77 meters) wide, is located on the tips of three long booms and is one of the most important components of the $10 billion observatory.
Webb is a three mirror anastigmat telescope consisting of the large 21.3-foot-wide (6.5-meter) primary mirror, the secondary mirror, and a tertiary mirror. The primary mirror, using its 18 gold-plated segments, will collect incoming light from distant stars, galaxies, and exoplanets, and then reflect a focused beam to the secondary mirror. The beam will then bounce back toward the primary mirror and enter into the tertiary and fine steering mirrors. There, the precious light will finally reach the four scientific instruments situated behind the primary mirror.
A view of the fully deployed secondary mirror during testing. Photo: NASA/C. Gunn
Today’s deployment of the secondary reflector tripod began at 10:40 a.m. EST. The first step was to release a series of launch locks that prevented the folded-up telescope from getting damaged during launch. Following a quick confidence check, the controllers sent a command for the tripod to make a single small move, which happened at 11:08 a.m. Happy with the result, controllers then issued a command to make the full move—the release of the secondary support structure.
A data-driven, real-time animated view of the telescope shown in NASA’s live webcast of the deployment depicted the tripod slowly shifting into position. The two bottom legs moved into place, while the upper leg, with its one hinge, unfolded as expected. The support structure reached its fully extended position at 11:20 a.m. EST, some 11 minutes after the full move command was issued. Controllers then latched the secondary mirror into place, in a process that lasted for 45 minutes.
Screenshot from NASA’s broadcast of the secondary mirror deployment, showing an animated view of the Webb telescope and the control rooms. Screenshot: NASA TV
The successful unfolding of the secondary reflector tripod sets the stage for the next step: testing the mirror to make sure it moves on command. Assuming that goes well, the team will then unfold and latch the two primary mirror wings. While all this is happening, the telescope, along with its scientific instruments, will undergo rapid cooling now that the sunshield is in place. NASA says it should take several weeks for Webb to reach stable temperatures.
The observatory is currently en route to its destination, Lagrange point 2, which is located approximately 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. Science operations should begin in around six months, at which time the infrared telescope will gather light from the first galaxies and stars to appear in the universe.
More: Here’s What Could Still Go Wrong With the Webb Space Telescope.
Artist’s conception of the Webb telescope. Image: NASA
NASA, after a slight technical delay, has now tightened all five layers of the Webb Telescope’s protective sunshield.
The tensioning of the first three layers began early Monday, in a process that lasted for nearly six hours. The remaining two layers—the ones farthest from the Sun—were tightened today, NASA announced in a tweet. This is welcome news, as the successful deployment of the sunshield sets the stage for the next phase of the mission: deploying the telescope’s gigantic mirror.
Measuring 47 feet (14.3 meters) across and 70 feet (21.3 meters) long, the kite-shaped sunshield will protect Webb from stellar radiation and minimize interference caused by the observatory’s instrumentation. Webb needs this shield to function properly, making this a critically important phase of the mission—but getting all five membranes to stretch out tight is more difficult than it sounds.
James Cooper, NASA’s Webb sunshield manager, said “complex interactions between the structures, the tensioning mechanisms, the cables and the membranes,” is what makes this phase so challenging, as he explained in a NASA blog post. “This was the hardest part to test on the ground,” he added, saying the Northrop Grumman and NASA team is “doing great work.”
At a briefing with reporters on Monday, Bill Ochs, Webb project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said around three-quarters of the observatory’s 344 potential points of failure will be retired once the sunshield is fully tensioned.
Last week, the deployment of two booms on either side of the observatory took longer than expected, so controllers were given a day off on January 1 to rest. Tightening of the sunshield was then scheduled for January 2, but NASA instead used the day to resolve a pair of minor issues. Specifically, the team had to rebalance Webb’s solar array to draw more power and re-orient the spacecraft to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the motors used for tensioning, according to NASA.
The delay also provided an opportunity for the team to study how Webb is behaving in its new space environment. “Nothing we can learn from simulations on the ground is as good as analyzing the observatory when it’s up and running,” Ochs explained in a post on January 2. “Now is the time to take the opportunity to learn everything we can about its baseline operations.”
The brief pause is not a problem, as the team is not currently under any kind of time pressure; NASA says “flexibility [is] built into the timeline.” The next step now is to deploy the tripod holding the secondary mirror.
Those minor glitches aside, everything seems to be going exceptionally well, knock on wood. As an added bonus, the precision of the Webb launch means this historic mission could last for more than 10 years, owing to the fuel savings. The observatory is expected to enter into the science phase of its mission in approximately six months, at which time it will gaze upon the oldest galaxies in the universe, look for new exoplanets, and scan distant atmospheres in search of extraterrestrial life.
More: Here’s what could still go wrong with the Webb space telescope.
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
The Webb space telescope awaiting launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. Photo: ESA/CNES/Arianespace
After decades of waiting, the Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to blast off. You can watch this historic launch live right here.
For years now I’ve had to refer to the “upcoming” James Webb Space Telescope and make promises about how this $10 billion observatory, a joint project of NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), will some day fundamentally alter our view of the cosmos. For me, the experience of writing this “how to watch” post is nothing short of surreal, and I can scarcely believe it’s happening. But it’s true—the waiting appears to finally be over, as Webb is packed atop a rocket and gazing upwards into the heavens.
The space telescope is scheduled to launch at 7:20 a.m. EST (4:20 a.m. PST) on Christmas morning from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. An Ariane 5 rocket will perform the heavy lifting, blasting off from launch complex ELA-3. The 32-minute launch window for the day will end at 7:52 a.m. EST (4:52 a.m. PST).
NASA TV will provide a rocket fueling update at 3:00 a.m. EST (12:00 a.m. PST), but the real show begins at 6:00 a.m. EST (3:00 a.m. PST). Live feeds of the launch will be made available at NASA TV, YouTube, and on ESA WEB TV ONE. Or you can stay right here and catch the action at the feed provided below.
ESA will also be broadcasting in French and Spanish. A steady stream of updates will appear on Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch, so as long as you have an internet connection you should be fine. NASA’s post-launch press conference is scheduled to start at 9:00 a.m. EST (6:00 a.m. PST), also on NASA TV.
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The launch will be exciting—and completely nerve wracking—but so too will be the first hour of the mission. Webb will need to deploy its solar panels and perform a course correction maneuver, as the spacecraft begins its one-month journey to the second Lagrange point (a gravitationally stable spot some 1 million miles from Earth). The next steps will involve a complex series of deployments and calibrations, with Webb expected to enter into the science phase of its mission in around six months.
Webb is the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built. The infrared observatory was supposed to launch in 2007, but technical and budgetary hurdles, among other issues, resulted in the delay. Astronomers will use the telescope to observe the universe’s earliest galaxies, investigate the birthplaces of stars and planets, and scan the atmospheres of distant worlds. The mission is supposed to last for at least five years, but the goal is to keep Webb going for 10 years.
More: Here’s what could still go wrong with the Webb Space Telescope.
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.