NASA Is Launching a New Telescope That Could Offer Some Cosmic Eye Candy | Hacker News Reader

NASA Is Launching a New Telescope That Could Offer Some Cosmic Eye Candy

npr.org

43 pointsScottMann24 comments

Small precision, because the title of the article is wrong:

JWST is a joint NASA–ESA–CSA project and is actually launched by ESA.

Yes, you’re correct, but NASA is funding ~97% of the project. CSA and ESA each contributed a science instrument, and ESA is providing the launch. Otherwise, it’s all NASA.

I find the James Webb the most interesting scientific instrument ever. Finding indications of life on planets light years away just boggles the mind.

I’ve been following it since I was in college (early 10’s) and I’m beyond excited. I have serious anxiety around the launch going well and getting the telescope safely into orbit. Truly priceless.

same here

we've been lucky enough to see both new horizons pluto flyby and the dawn mission to ceres, but james web telescope takes the top spot in terms of anticipation for me

For sure! I knew it was crazy complicated, but watched a youtube video that details the deployment procedure.......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTxLAGchWnA

It takes almost a month and is craaaazy complicated!

Plus it looks like some freaky alien thing.

Another deployment video with some dialogue explaining things:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ihVeEoUdo

I'm dyiiing! To see the images the lens will capture. We truly are in a new-era of the Space race.

Why does this article completely erase contributions from ESA/CSA? There's not a single mention of the other two partners, one of which is doing the actual launch?

Besides NPR obviously having an American bias, I tried to find a funding source breakdown. Best I could find was from wikipedia:

"ESA is contributing about €300 million, including the launch. The Canadian Space Agency pledged $39 million Canadian in 2007"

Seems ESA contributed about 3%, and CSA .3%. It may just be a biases ommision, but I also wouldnt be surprised if theres some salty feeling about who actually paid for the telescope.

From wiki: “By the mid-2010s, the U.S. contribution was still expected to cost US$8.8 billion. In 2007, the expected ESA contribution was about €350 million. With the U.S. and international funding combined, the overall cost not including extended operations is projected to be over US$10 billion when completed”

I wonder how much time and testing has gone into deployment operations vs science operations in the development of the JWST. It's entirely possible that in this case we would still do it the same way again, but in hindsight it seems there is a point where developing a new spacecraft that minimizes that complexity might be an option that should remain on the table for these missions.

Here is the news from 2016: After 20 Years, NASA Finally Finished Building The James Webb Space Telescope

Now it's ready for the final tests before launch in 2018

https://www.popsci.com/james-webb-space-telescope-is-now-rea...

Not knowing the actual team, but being familiar with space projects, the satellite probably didn't start getting built in earnest until the MCDR in 2010. Most of these kind of projects start off as a spitballing study and then grow and grow and grow into a flight program. That is the time period being cited as starting in the 90s.

It's expensive as hell, and took a while to build - but I think, considering what it is, the schedule isn't all that crazy. The price is a bit insane... but it's also like, wonder of the world level of engineering. Building something like this is akin to making the tower of babel, and then placing that on top of a rocket and sending it almost a million miles away in L2 orbit.

We could argue that a constellation of smaller and cheaper satellites would have probably been better - honestly I don't know much of anything about space optics so I'm not sure if that's really the case lol.

I think it's a pretty amazing project and can't wait to see the results!

> The price is a bit insane... but it's also like, wonder of the world level of engineering

So is the price of a bespoke suit.

It's not like you can go down to Sal's Satellite Symposium and pick one of these things off the rack like Levi 501 jeans (or picking up a Toyota RAV4). Most of these types of things are more handmade than even (e.g.) Ferraris, which at least have a production run of a few hundred or thousand cars for any given model.

The closest things for 'production run' of satellites would be GPS, which are ordered in batches:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_satellite_blocks#Block_III...

Starlink has a production line

Now that they’ve done it once, would building a second copy easier? (And less costly?)

I think the JWST team would do better to keep a low profile until they know all is well after deployment.

As for "eye candy" a lot of the imaging may well be at a single wavelength so a single color. Many images of exoplanets will probably be dots and the, the interesting information being distribution of IR "colors" from point sources.

I’m very excited too and look forward to the launch, but given its history I’d be careful about using the present tense to describe it.

They’re not even past the pirates yet!

Is it going to provide eye candy? I’ve heard it’s supposed to work in non-visible spectrum like infrared?

> Is it going to provide eye candy? I’ve heard it’s supposed to work in non-visible spectrum like infrared?

Most astronomical images (even those taken in the optical) are not as a human eye would see/perceive the scene. They're almost always made in a way to highlight features of scientific interest, look aesthetic, or both. And in the case of images outside the visual spectrum, they are assigned representative colors.

Another angle is that astronomical images are generally intensity images, taken through a single filter, rather than inherently color images. Several of these images, taken through different filters, can be combined to make a color image. However, even if taken in the visual portion of the spectrum, the responses of the filters generally won't match the human eye's responses, so the images aren't what the human eye would see.

For example, the Spitzer Space Telescope (covering 3.6-160 microns), captured images of astrophysical objects and these images were used to generate representative images:

- Helix nebula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comets_Kick_up_Dust_in_He...

- Cepheus B and C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA23126-CepheusC%26Bregi...

JWST operates largely in the infrared (though it has some overlap with the visual range), but will undoubtedly capture wonderful images in the infrared and these images will be combined to make stunning pseudo-color images.

Ahead of prediction!

https://xkcd.com/2014/

Sadly this is outdated. On September 16th, 2021 the ESA announced a delay of the launch until mid-2023 to repair pieces of the spacecraft dislodged during transportation to the launch site [0]. More info on the video including damages.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

ESA's own website doesn't mention any such thing as of 2021-09-18: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/

"Launch date: 18 December 2021"

This seems like the sort of thing they would take some trouble to keep up to date. Got a source I can trust more than some random YouTube video?

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