The Hubble Space Telescope has given humanity unprecedented glimpses into the universe, but it will soon be replaced by a far more powerful model. NASA administrator Charles Bolden unveiled the completed $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will be able to see the universe as it was 13 billion years ago. It’s equipped with a 21-foot, gold-coated mirror array that can collect seven times more light than Hubble and scan the infrared spectrum to see through dust. “We’ve done two decades of innovation and hard work, and this is the result,” project scientist John Mather says.
NASA procrastinated the planning of launching the telescope from October 2018 to 2019. This is due to space craft integration issues.
The change in launch timing is not indicative of hardware or technical performance concerns – Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. Rather, the integration of the various spacecraft elements is taking longer than expected.
Now the telescope will get launched in March 2019 said NASA officials.
Such accurate infrared observations are possible only if James Webb is kept extremely cold. To keep the scope in permanent shadow the spacecraft is outfitted with a tennis-court-size sunshield.
Testing of the telescope and science instruments is going well at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, agency officials said. But similar work with the spacecraft bus and sunshield, at a Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach, California, has experienced delays, they added.
James Webb will lift off atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the European spaceport near Kourou, in French Guiana. The telescope will eventually make its way to the sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, a gravitationally stable spot about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. James Webb will therefore be too distant for spacewalking astronauts to service and repair.
Webb’s spacecraft and sunshield are larger and more complex than most spacecraft. The combination of some integration activities taking longer than initially planned, such as the installation of more than 100 sunshield membrane release devices, factoring in lessons learned from earlier testing, like longer time spans for vibration testing, has meant the integration and testing process is just taking longer – said Eric Smith, James Webb Space Telescope program director at NASA headquarters, in the same statement. Considering the investment NASA has made, and the good performance to date, we want to proceed very systematically through these tests to be ready for a spring 2019 launch.