The Future of Knowledge, Featuring Telescopes

By Alexander Hiner

James Webb Telescope’s (JWST) expected lifespan doubled after a successful launch and two mid-course corrections.

That’s the message from the December 29 NASA blog. NASA’s goal prior to launch was to get at least five years of science operations from the telescope. They now believe it will be operational for significantly longer than 10 years.

With a mirror diameter of about 21.3 feet, JWST has a surface area six times larger than its predecessor Hubble. It’s designed with Infra-red (IR) technology, a low frequency heat radiation, to see beyond gas and dust clouds in space. Beyond anything humanity has ever seen before.

“The thing with infra-red, though, is you need the telescope to be cool,” said Ajay Narayanan, GRC physics instructor. One of the more sensitive pieces on the telescope, the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI), works at temperatures below -447 degrees Fahrenheit.

It requires a helium refrigerator to stay that cold… in space.

Right now, the telescope is at its destination, the L2 point, a semi-stable gravitational position about one million miles from Earth. There, the telescope’s sun shields will be able to block IR heat from the sun, earth and moon at all times.

The next five months will consist of checking optics, aligning the telescope, and calibration.

After that? Science!

With this new view into space, everything known about space may change.

“Even our basic understanding of planets around other stars is going to change dramatically,” Narayanan said. “No one knows how it will change, but we think it will change… a lot.”