Will the James Webb telescope FINALLY be launched Christmas morning?

[Gomez Adams]

Originally supposed to launch on the 22nd and it's been one delay after another.

Launch - NASA Science

Webb Launch Slideshow The image below is a SLIDESHOW. Hover over the image to reveal the controls and see the image titles. Click the image to go to a Flickr detail page with more info and the ability to download the image at various resolutions (lower right down arrow). View the entire...

jwst.nasa.gov

So maybe we'll all get a 10 billion dollar Christmas present this weekend! I certainly hope so.

If all goes to plan it should take about a month for it to get into position. We should start getting our first images in about 6 or 7 months.

This thing is going to make Hubble look like a pair of binoculars. It's THAT powerful.

 

[Gomez Adams]

Live feed. Supposed to launch in about 15 minutes.

 

[Zeedox]

I just watched the replay. It's always a hoot listening to a french countdown.

I wonder how much older the universe will get once the infra-red portion is on-line.

 

[Gomez Adams]

I have always been of the opinion that the universe is much older than we think it is.

I base that on the story Einstein told about how he came up with his general relativity theory. You've most likely heard it, but it was when he was sitting on the bus pulling away from the stop and he looked back at the clock tower. He realized that the faster he moved away from the clock tower, the longer it would take for light to reach him, so time would appear to slow down.

I think that even as far as Hubble has looked back in time, it (and by extension us) is being fooled into thinking that the universe is only around 13 to 15 billion years old.

But what I don't think they're taking into consideration as much as they should is the fact that the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate. So that means it's taking longer and longer each day that goes by for the light from the big bang to reach us.

I think the James Web is going to look back into that deep field that Hubble looked into years ago and see nothing but yet another deep field. It'll look back into the noise of the big bang and just see more noise.

I think within a year or two our estimate of how old the universe is may double. At least.

 

[Zeedox]

We've also just been grazing the infrared. It is my understanding the red-shift of moving light grows fainter and fainter until only infrared is left - which means there's quite probably much more universe out there we have not been able to "see" yet.

 

[Gomez Adams]

So far so good.

Webb telescope successfully unfurls its tennis court-size sunshield in space

The James Webb Space Telescope successfully unfurled its 70-foot sunshield on Tuesday. This critical milestone is one of several that must occur for Webb to function properly in space, and it's one of the most challenging spacecraft deployments NASA has ever attempted.

www.cnn.com

 

[Zeedox]

I saw a figure earlier. There it is:

With the sunshield successfully in place, Webb's project manager Bill Ochs said the telescope has overcome the potential for 70% to 75% of the more than 300 single-point failures that could disrupt its ability to function.

 

[Gomez Adams]

It's finally in place.

Telescope reaches its final destination a million miles from Earth

Almost a month after launch, the James Webb SpaceTelescope has reached its final destination: a special orbit location about a million miles from Earth, even beyond the moon.

www.cnn.com