Introduction
On September 28th, NASA announced that it will be postponing the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to Spring of 2019. Personally I am disappointed for having the prolonged wait but am comforted by knowing how seriously they are taking the project.
The telescope was originally planned to be launched near the end of 2018 but was delayed to give engineers more time for construction.
“The change in launch timing is not indicative of hardware or technical performance concerns,” “Rather, the integration of the various spacecraft elements is taking longer than expected.” (Thomas Zurbuchen)
While we wait, let's take a look a look at what we can look forward to:
Beautiful Images
The predecessor to the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, is known for famous for the many pictures it has taken of our . The JWST is sure to be even more impressive. It will have a collecting area approximately 7 times larger than Hubble’s allowing the JWST to capture photos with 15 times the resolution!
The pillars of creation is one of the most well known and arguably one of the most beautiful pictures captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Discoveries
One of the major limitations of the Hubble Space Telescope is that it was designed to capture light primarily from the ultraviolet and visible light spectrums. One consequence is that the Hubble is unable to see through dust clouds or observe the interactions within them. Unlike the Hubble, the JWST will be collecting primarily infrared light. Because of this the JWST will allow us to discover a multitude of new exoplanets and even learn about their environments.
Not only does infrared light penetrate through these dust clouds, but will allow us to look farther back into the beginning of our universe. As the universe expands, the light emitted from it takes longer to reach us and is perceived to have a greater wavelength. This process is known as red-shift. As a result of red-shift the light emitted from the earliest events in our universe have red-shifted well beyond the visible end of the spectrum and into the infrared. Therefore, by observing infrared light JWST will be enabled to observe some of the earliest events in our universe. Because of these advances we can expect to learn about the formation of everything from individual stars and planets to black holes and even entire galaxies.
The bar graph above is depicting how far back into the history of the universe we can observe with various instruments. The JWST will be able to look back to approximately 200 million years after the big bang which is 280 million years before the Hubble!
What are your thoughts on the James Webb Space Telescope? What do you hope to learn from from it? Let us know in the comments!
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Work Cited:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-postpones-launch-of-james-webb-space-telescope/
https://jwst.nasa.gov/comparison_about.html
https://www.space.com/17-amazing-hubble-discoveries.html
http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/history/timeline/
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-james-webb-space-telescope-to-be-launched-spring-2019