James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its new home – an orbit almost a million miles from Earth The James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most complex space observatory built by NASA, has reached its final destination: L2, the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, an orbit located about a million miles away. Mission control sent instructions to fire the telescope's thrusters at 1400 EST (1900 UTC) on Monday. The small …
First sentence of the report in the Guardian
"The world's largest and most powerful space telescope..."
With a note at the end acknowledging the correction.
It's possible that the error was the fault of the original source, it's an Associated Press report.
and a lack of cooling wouldn't " trigger misleading signals", it would swamp the detector with thermal noise that would blot out signals at the strength they are looking for.
I criticised an el reg article a while back that had obviously be reworded by someone without a clue of the subject matter. This has the same feel to it.
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Partnership
NASA, ESA and CSA have collaborated on the telescope since 1996. ESA's participation in construction and launch was approved by its members in 2003 and an agreement was signed between ESA and NASA in 2007. In exchange for full partnership, representation and access to the observatory for its astronomers, ESA is providing the NIRSpec instrument, the Optical Bench Assembly of the MIRI instrument, an Ariane 5 ECA launcher, and manpower to support operations.[116][167] The CSA will provide the Fine Guidance Sensor and the Near-Infrared Imager Slitless Spectrograph plus manpower to support operations.[168]
Several thousand scientists, engineers, and technicians spanning 15 countries have contributed to the build, test and integration of the JWST.[169] A total of 258 companies, government agencies, and academic institutions are participating in the pre-launch project; 142 from the United States, 104 from 12 European countries, and 12 from Canada.[169] Other countries as NASA partners, such as Australia, have or will be involved in post-launch operation.
Don't forget Arianespace providing a rocket which put JWST on it's correct vector so precisely, that they've saved them five years worth of manoeuvring fuel.
@phuzz
It's all very family.
"Immediately following the successful first test launch of an Ariane 1 on 24 December 1979, the French space agency Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES) and the ESA created a new company, Arianespace, for the purpose of promoting, marketing, and managing Ariane operations.[13][2] According to Arianespace, at the time of its establishment, it was the world's first launch services company."
Arianespace "is the marketing and sales organization for the European space industry and various component suppliers."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianespace
Surely the L2 point from the Earth takes exactly a year to orbit the sun?
Aha, they mean the telescope completes its tiny orbit of the L2 point every 180 days. "Utilizing thrust every three weeks or so from small rocket engines aboard Webb will keep it orbiting L2, looping around it in a halo orbit once every six months." https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/01/21/webbs-journey-to-l2-is-nearly-complete/
It doesn't matter how you look at this, it's a pretty damned good bit of work by some very clever people.
Spend 10 years building something that's several metres tall, sit it on top of a "bomb waiting to happen", sling it into space, let it hurtle along at ~10 KM/s (gradually slowing) for around a million miles, and it arrives on time and is exactly where it's supposed to be. No options to retry it or "have another go", and no-one forgot to remove that last cable-tie.
Good design and proper planning really is worth the effort.
It doesn't matter how you look at this, it's a pretty damned good bit of work by some very clever people.
As long as you overlook that "fifteen years late and twenty times over budget" business, which was in large part due to those very clever people screwing up on a regular basis. Even when it was ready to go launch was delayed because of a mis-wired plug.
> replicating stuff thousands of other organizations have been doing for decades
True, but those are politician-driven projects, full of power struggles, pork barrels and general incompetence. This here was a scientist project, so one could had hoped it would run more smoothly. Not totally smooth of course, since science has its own power struggle and pork barrel problems, but those are way smaller, and most importantly you (usually) lack the fundamental incompetency issue.
Anyway - it finally managed to get there, all is well that ends well!
Those are politician-driven projects, full of power struggles, pork barrels and general incompetence.
While this was designed sub-contracted to the usual pork-barrelled defence contractors, down-scoped, budget reduced, re-scoped, cancelled, restored, sub-contracted, launch vehicles (payload size G forces) changed because of politics etc etc
Come on Reg, that's a little derogatory for a great achievement, isn't it? $10bn over 25 years for discovering the secrets of the universe is great value for money. In 2008 the UK gov alone blew $850bn in 3 days and what did we discover in the 13 years since? That the richest benefitted the most. I'll take the $10bn Webb telescope any day.
Coming the week after Microsoft spent nearly $70bn to research the question "How many more years can we keep cranking out new versions of Call of Duty?" the Webb telescope looks like a bit of a bargain.
(Yes I know Microsoft are buying more than that. "How many more years can we keep milking World of Warcraft?", for example.)
It's 5% of 1% of the US GDP for one year...
Billions of ${currency} sound alot until you scale to a population.
Given the joint nature of the project we should be distributing that cost over a population of ~800 million people.
So that's ~$12.50/person over 25 years (or maybe over ten years for the duration of the science mission rather than the build process).
"Go for it, maybe you could get it published in . . . The Mirror."
Better make it a Haiku then. Attention spans and all.
On the other, that might be a bit intellectual for the MIrror. Maybe stick with a short limerick.
There was a young 'scope called James
who such lofty and high aims...
Now just a few months more to start the real science.
The months will be spent staring at the Large Magellanic Cloud and aligning each mirror so that it results in a single image. This takes so long because in order not to generate too much heat, each adjustment is done separately and even then in stages. Plus, speaking of heat, the JWST is still cooling and as it does new readjustments will have to be made.
It's too soon to predict when we can break out the popcorn, but here's a pint for the boffins to keep on ice.
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