OldDevilDawg
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NASA completes Webb telescope deployments (msn.com)
"At a cost of nearly $10 billion, Webb is the most expensive science spacecraft ever built and by far the most powerful space telescope, 100 times more sensitive than the 31-year-old Hubble, the observatory it will eventually replace.
It's also one of the most challenging to deploy, with success riding on the flawless operation of 178 release mechanisms that all had to work perfectly to carry out 50 major deployments to unfold the telescope after it was packed into the nose cone of a European Space Agency-supplied Ariane 5 rocket.
Bound for an orbit around the sun a million miles from Earth, Webb already is far beyond the reach of any foreseeable astronaut repair crews. Its complex, multi-step metamorphosis, requiring all those non-redundant mechanisms to work exactly as planned, simply had to work.
And it did.
The first science images are expected in about six months.
Webb was designed to capture light from the first stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang, radiation that has been stretched into the infrared region of the spectrum by the expansion of space itself over the past 13.8 billion years."
I don't know about anyone else here, but I'm incredibly excited to see what we can see.
"At a cost of nearly $10 billion, Webb is the most expensive science spacecraft ever built and by far the most powerful space telescope, 100 times more sensitive than the 31-year-old Hubble, the observatory it will eventually replace.
It's also one of the most challenging to deploy, with success riding on the flawless operation of 178 release mechanisms that all had to work perfectly to carry out 50 major deployments to unfold the telescope after it was packed into the nose cone of a European Space Agency-supplied Ariane 5 rocket.
Bound for an orbit around the sun a million miles from Earth, Webb already is far beyond the reach of any foreseeable astronaut repair crews. Its complex, multi-step metamorphosis, requiring all those non-redundant mechanisms to work exactly as planned, simply had to work.
And it did.
The first science images are expected in about six months.
Webb was designed to capture light from the first stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang, radiation that has been stretched into the infrared region of the spectrum by the expansion of space itself over the past 13.8 billion years."
I don't know about anyone else here, but I'm incredibly excited to see what we can see.
