by Adil Aftab
James Webb to Launch… Finally
The James Webb Space Telescope is finally headed to the launch pad after a dozen years of building, testing, and delaying the project. The huge, fragile space telescope is on the way by sea to French Guiana, where it's scheduled to launch on Dec. 18 on an Ariane 5 rocket.
To say the James Webb isn't an easy project would be an irony — the telescope has got to be packed into a rocket and unfurl, piece by piece, once in orbit. The opening of the telescope’s tennis-court–sized sunshield — five layers of thin plastic coated with aluminum, which keeps the equipment extremely cold — was demonstrated in 2018, though it failed its first test when screws came loose.
Once in space, it'll take six months and 180 maneuvers to unpack the James Webb, and with each command taking six seconds to succeed in the telescope, it can’t be wiped out in real-time. The telescope will orbit the world 1 million miles away — 4,500× further than the International space platform — which is far too far for a Hubble-style rescue mission. In other words, tons are riding on its unfurling sequence.
Unlike Hubble, which primarily captures light, the James Webb sees older and colder objects in near- and mid-infrared with its four sensors. this may allow it to ascertain m inside far-off dust clouds to see stars forming and peer at the youngest galaxies within the universe. It can even be wont to take atmospheric readings of exoplanets.
What will images from James Webb look like? there'll be a particular amount of artistic license involved in assigning colors to infrared wavelengths (similar to the method for images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was retired in 2020). The Hubble’s black and white images also are colorized either to represent what the human eye might see or to spotlight scientific features like the presence of oxygen.
The first images should arrive next summer; assuming the launch and therefore the painstaking unfurling process may be a success, they're bound to be even as awe-inspiring as anything Hubble has produced.
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