NASA’s latest image of the James Webb Space Telescope is beautiful

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA’s latest image of the James Webb Space Telescope is beautiful
Digital Trends
Dyllan Furness  April 26, 2017



NASA/Desiree Stover



Now that spring has arrived, NASA has released a new image of the largest and most expensive space telescope in history — and, in our eyes, it’s the most glorious yet.

After two decades of construction, the agency announced the completion of the James Webb Space Telescope last November, following the first important pretest to measure its primary mirror. Over the next few months, the telescope went through a series of grueling trials that shook, rattled, and froze the state-of-the-art machine, subjecting it to conditions it will have to face in outer space. Now, with the final gold-coated segment of its 21-foot-wide mirror array in place, the telescope sprawls like an enormous sunflower.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKzmqlkPvzo" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKzmqlkPvzo</a>

Scheduled to launch in October 2018, the Webb telescope will be the most powerful telescope in existence, built to capture infrared light from the first galaxies of the ancient universe.

To launch the satellite, the Webb telescope’s sunshield will be folded a dozen times before being packed into a bullet-shaped capsule. Once 930,000 miles distant from Earth (at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point), the array will unravel in a glorious, sky-gazing display.

“The groundbreaking sunshield design will assist in providing the imaging of the formation of stars and galaxies more than 13.5 billion years ago,” Webb sunshield manager Jim Flynn said in a statement last November. “The delivery of this final flight sunshield membrane is a significant milestone as we prepare for 2018 launch.”

At $8.7 billion in construction and operating costs, the Webb telescope is more than four time as expensive as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, and 100 times more powerful. However, where the Hubble was within reach of astronauts who could spacewalk to the telescope if anything were to wrong, the Webb will be too far into space for an easy mission. For that reason, it’s imperative that everything work as planned before the Webb telescope is sent on its journey.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-latest-image-james-webb-142916156.html

[gwillybj]

As someone on twitter said: Don't break it.