22-and takeoff could be pushed back further still.īefore the telescope can begin its work, it will face technological hurdles, too. There have been some last-minute delays, too-it was previously set to launch Dec. The telescope had a near-death experience in 2012 when Congress threatened to pull funding, but the last-minute delivery of the mirror persuaded lawmakers to stay their hand, and Webb survived. First proposed in 1995 with a predicted price tag of $500 million and a hoped-for launch date of 2007, it has repeatedly blown past budget limits and deadlines. Webb had to overcome a lot of hurdles to get as far as it’s come. “It’s like comparing a baby who’s one day told to a baby who’s one year old, and that’s a huge difference.” “The difference between what Hubble and Webb will see is not like comparing someone who’s 70 years old to somebody who’s 71 years old,” says Scott Friedman, commissioning scientist for the Webb team. That comparatively small improvement is enormously significant, opening the door to the universe’s babyhood-a period in which it matured spectacularly quickly. The infrared, however, is exactly the band in which the Webb was designed to see, pushing its sensitivity another 200 million years back, to 13.6 billion years ago, or just 200 million years after the Big Bang. A lot happened in those missing early years-galaxies began to form, stars began to flicker on-but the expanding universe and the great distance the light from that epoch is traveling to reach us cause its wavelength to stretch from the visible spectrum and into the infrared, to which Hubble and human eyes are blind. But those pictures also reveal its sole shortcoming: Hubble sees in the ultraviolet and visible spectrums, allowing it to peer approximately 13.4 billion years back in time-or just 400 million years after the Big Bang (because light from the cosmos can take a heck of a long time to reach us, looking up at the night sky is effectively looking into the past). The Hubble’s work is most powerfully captured in the vast album of dazzling photos it’s sent back in the 31 years it has been flying. The spacecraft entrusted to the Ariane 5 was the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s-and the entire astronomical community’s-follow-on to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, which has widely been considered the greatest space observatory ever built-until now, at least. ![]() ![]() 25, at 7:20 AM ET, the small, forested country on the forehead of South America became the center of things indeed, when a European Space Agency Ariane V rocket lifted off with a payload that represents $9.5 billion worth of hardware and 25 years of work, and on which the next generation of research into the origin of the cosmos depends. French Guiana does not often get the chance to be the center of the world, to say nothing of the universe-or at least humanity’s understanding of it.
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