The James Webb Space Telescope is working as well as astronomers dreamed | Hacker News Reader

The James Webb Space Telescope is working as well as astronomers dreamed

npr.org

51 pointssharkweek7 comments

I’ve been following their progress on this RSS feed:

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/feed/

Strong recommend if you are into RSS.

Are they still waiting for it to cool down to the point where they can see farther than Hubble?

There are four instruments. One of them MIRI needs to be actively cooled down to 7K. I believe that should be completed sometime next month.

I’ve only been following this deployment as a casual observer (mostly from the NPR stories like this one) but I’m really excited to see what the future holds for this thing. It almost seems like it’s been too good to be true (great launch, flawless deployment of the mirrors, even reports that the lifespan of the device may be nearly double original estimates because of minimal fuel consumption) but I don’t think it is. Everything I see says this is the real deal!

Does anyone have a good site that I can bookmark (or RSS subscribe) that will post updates of discoveries and all the photos it’s taking as they come in?

(On a tangential note: the software engineer in me is insanely jealous that something this complex has gone so smoothly. Must be better at writing unit tests than I am or something… yeah, that’s probably it.)

If you had $10B over 24 years you’d have enough resources to write some good unit tests, too! ;)

Here is a bunch of cool links I've collected over the past few months:

This one is the Space Telescope Science Institute that manages the JWST operation.

https://www.youtube.com/user/spacetelescopevision/videos

This one is the JWST channel itself but no photos yet.

https://www.youtube.com/c/NASAWebbTelescope/videos

This will probably be the best source for photos in the future.

https://webbtelescope.org/

The following link has a lot of documentation about the telescope, instrumentation and planned observations. Really a good sink of time.

https://www.stsci.edu/jwst

A lot of content here about how the scientists use the telescope.

https://www.youtube.com/c/JWSTObserver/videos

John Mather talking about the system engineering of the JWST.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHiRXQUiaE&list=PLMN_sNW0v5...

Awesome

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