{"id":1798,"date":"2010-10-21T21:03:22","date_gmt":"2010-10-22T02:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1798"},"modified":"2010-10-21T21:31:14","modified_gmt":"2010-10-22T02:31:14","slug":"good-luck-nasa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1798","title":{"rendered":"Good Luck, NASA"},"content":{"rendered":"

I caught up recently with NASA’s latest big thing, the James Webb Space Telescope<\/strong>. There’s a good article about it in the October Scientific American. In a way it replaces the Hubble, and in a way it’s different. The Webb is built to observe a broad range of infrared light coming from distant reaches of the universe, whereas Hubble focused on the visible spectrum, with a bit of range into the ultraviolet and infrared zones. <\/p>\n

Also, the Webb is more of a \u201cdeep space\u201d mission; whereas the Hubble orbited at around 380 miles from Earth, the Webb will find its way to a \u201cgravity point\u201d about a million miles from Earth, on the far side away from the Sun (towards Mars). It is a good bit more sensitive than the Hubble, partly for being bigger, and partly for being so far away from Earth (which radiates a lot of energy and fuzzes up the really faint signals from space). It won’t deliver those fantastic pictures as Hubble did, but it will return a lot of data maps that will help answer a lot of questions about what went on in the first 200 million years after the Big Bang. It will also help to find other planets of distant stars that might support life.<\/p>\n

If it makes it. The James Webb is scheduled for launch in June 2014, and is one of the most technically ambitious things that NASA has ever done. I won’t explain the details (the Sci Am article does a great job with that), but let’s just say that this is a whole lot more complex than rocketing a cylinder or a tube up into orbit. The darn thing has to just about assemble itself once it’s out there in the blue (or black, really). There are all kinds of moving parts and crazy maneuvers that NASA has not yet tried out, at least on something the size of the Webb telescope. And if one little thing goes wrong, just about the whole thing will be in-operable. We won’t be able to send a Space Shuttle out to fix it, and there aren’t any other back-up plans either (like some kind of robo-repair ship). <\/p>\n

So NASA is really betting the farm here, putting all of its eggs in a nice little basket; does this really make sense? I know that I’m not a space scientist and I may not have the right to criticize the great minds who put men on the moon and brought them home. But then again, these are the same great minds who gave us the Space Shuttle, telling us how much better it would be than the Apollo-Saturn rockets that came before it. And now they tell us that the old capsule on top of a disposable rocket is the best way to get people into space after all. The Webb will cost about $1 billion per year over five years; that will eat up about one-quarter of NASA’s budget for the scientific explorations of space. If one little gizmo locks up or buckles the wrong way, that’s money totally down the drain.<\/p>\n

Oh well . . . Godspeed, NASA. I’ll have my fingers crossed for you (assuming I’m still alive and well in 2014). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I caught up recently with NASA’s latest big thing, the James Webb Space Telescope. There’s a good article about it in the October Scientific American. In a way it replaces the Hubble, and in a way it’s different. The Webb is built to observe a broad range of infrared light coming from distant reaches of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1798"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1800,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions\/1800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}