The space observatory, whose mission reached ten billion dollars (223 billion crowns), will settle 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, almost five times further than the moon. The moon will fly to the second Lagrange point where the gravitational influences of the Earth and the Sun balance. The preparations and tests of the device will take another five months before the telescope starts scanning the cosmos.
The Webb Telescope will be the largest and most powerful space telescope launched by humans to date. It should oversee the beginnings of the existence of our universe, when the first stars and galaxies formed 13.5 billion years ago. According to NASA, it will directly observe a hitherto unseen part of space and time.
Named after President Kennedy’s NASA director, who brought the United States to the moon in Apollo projects, the telescope carries instruments that observe space, mostly in the infrared spectrum. It is the easiest to observe stars and their planets, whose luminosity is not as different in it as in the ordinary – human-visible spectrum.
Astronomers will see more of this, but they will also see more, which means one thing when observing the universe: they will see more of the past. From the far end of the universe, the light travels to the observer, the more technically it is. And since light from very distant galaxies gradually stretches due to the expansion of the universe (redshift), the infrared spectrum is best for observing distant, and therefore old, objects. By the way, the sensitivity of JWST is so high that it would, purely theoretically, make it possible to observe the heat radiating from the Earth to a bumblebee flying on the moon.
It is an apparatus that carries a number of technical “best”. It has one of the largest solar shields, is composed of eighteen probably the smoothest hexagonal gilded mirrors in the world (differences are calculated in the width of atoms), is the most expensive project in space astronomy… But it is also one of the most important: it has real hopes that one day humanity will find extraterrestrial life.
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