NASA and its international partners are counting down to launch the most expensive science probe ever built on Christmas Day, a 10 billion dollar telescope Designed to capture the starlight of the first galaxies born in The Big Bang Fire Crucible.
The James Webb Space Telescope is planned billions of dollars over budget and years late to launch from the European Space Agency’s Kourou launch site in French Guiana at 7:20 am EDT atop an Ariane 5 rocket, weather permitting.
Equipped with two solid fuel thrusters, the rocket will propel Webb’s spine away from the northeast coast of South America in an eastern trajectory, launching the telescope to fly alone about 27 minutes after takeoff.
Chris Jean / NASA via Getty Images
The observatory’s single solar panel, still folded to fit the Ariane 5’s nose cone, is still needed to recharge the spacecraft’s batteries, about six minutes after separation, the first in a series of important milestones.
Webb will need a month to reach a planned parking spot 1 million miles from Earth, on the opposite side of the moon’s orbit – known as Lagrange Point 2 – where it can orbit the Sun in a gravitational line with Earth, providing the cold and dark environment necessary for mission success.
The telescope has been optimized to capture images of the first stars and galaxies to begin glowing after the Big Bang, light that has been stretched into the infrared region of the spectrum by the expansion of space itself over the past 13.8 billion years.
This light cannot be seen by the icon. Hubble Space TelescopeDesigned to study visible light wavelengths. However, Hubble discovered galaxies that date back half a billion years before the Big Bang.
But Webb must be able to go hundreds of millions of years beyond that, to discover the light that began to eject when the universe was only 200 million years old or older. This is the age when the universe emerged from the hydrogen fog at birth and starlight began to travel freely through space.
NASA via AP
Close to home, Webb will also study the atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby stars to determine their habitability and provide a routine close-up of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in Earth’s solar system from Mars outward.
But first, the telescope must deploy a five-layer sunscreen the size of a tennis court, open its 21.3-foot-wide segmented primary mirror, and deploy its secondary mirror on a tripod.
That Comprehensive or range deployments, the most complex attempt at a scientific investigation ever, will take place during the first two weeks of the mission.
If all goes well, engineers and astronomers will spend the next five months or so lining up the telescope’s optics and calibrating its four scientific instruments. The first scientific images are expected in about six months.
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