New Era of Observatory - James Web Space Telescope
The beauty and mystery of our night sky has intriqued human kind since we first developed the capacity and need to rationalize our existence and our surroundings. We strive to give purpose to our surroundings, especially those natural things that can be difficult to explain. Humans have been motivated to understand these heavenly wonders throughout history. In this 16th and 17th century we saw the first naked-eye observatory, which yielded some predictability and understanding of the night stars and further inspired our great thinkers to pursue even more knowledge. Galileo improved available telescoping technologies, pointed his telescope at the sky, and shook our understanding of the natural world.
The story of telescopic exploration didn't stop in the 17th century. Numerous large ground telescopes have been built for observation and research in our recent history. The telescope most famous for bringing us outstanding pictures inside and ourside of our galaxy is the Hubble Space Telescope. Though not he first space telescope, undeniably we've all been impacted by the yields of this now 30 year old telescope. Now that this piece of scientific equipment has reached retirement age, what's next?
The James Web Space Telescope(JWST). Development began in 1996 and was originally planned to launch in 2007. However, due to a multitude of technical and budget issues the improved space telescope has been, as of the publication of this post, delayed to October of 2021. This JWST isn't exactly a replacement for the HST as the two telescopes meet two different needs. Hubble can collect and process light on the visible as well as infrared wave lengths and the JWST will specialize in infrared range. However, this new telescope is immensely more powerful and should allow us to peer into the oldest parts of the universe. The JWST is around the size of a tennis court and has an array of collection mirrors over 6 times bigger than Hubble.
I'm absolutely excited to get that satellite into space and start producing images! Let's hope for a successful launch in October 2021.