NASA’s New Telescope Will Show Us the Infancy of the Universe
Twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making, the James Webb
Space Telescope will enable scientists to see deeper into the past than
ever before.
Next
month, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to take a slow boat
from Los Angeles, spend a few days traversing the Panama Canal, and
arrive at a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The telescope will have
been twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making. Thousands
of scientists and engineers from fourteen countries will have worked on
it. It could have flown, sure, but it’s a tight squeeze—plus the
telescope weighs seven tons, and Kourou’s airfield is connected to its
spaceport by seven bridges not built to endure such a load. The
telescope will be put into Ariane 5, a European rocket named for a
mythical princess who helped a man she loved defeat the Minotaur and
escape a maze. Ariane 5 will carry the telescope some ten thousand
kilometres in thirty minutes. The J.W.S.T. will then continue on its
own, for twenty-nine days, toward a lonely, lovely orbit in space, about
1.5 million kilometres from Earth, where we will never visit it, though
it will stay in constant communication with us. From Earth, it will
appear ten thousand times fainter than the faintest star.
