NASA's JWST: James Webb Space Telescope

Using the JWST to spot extra-solar objects moving through the Milky Way galaxy near Earth: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/studying-the-next-interstellar-interlo...

In a related link, the recent US bestseller by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: the first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth, was discussed in an interview with the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-10002/

In that interview, Dr. Loeb states that if humans engage in long-term space flight, cosmic rays could inflict brain damage on those people within one year that could not be repaired; thus, it makes more sense to send artificially intelligent devices on long space flights rather than humans.

Methods to be used by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find previously unseen parts of this universe:

https://www.inverse.com/science/how-will-webb-engineers-color-code-images

Further discussion of the JWST by a US non-profit science institute:

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-008

And cop this: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220319.html. Seems that all the complex unfolding of the mirror worked perfectly. I’ll bet that’s the most beautiful picture that the engineering team have ever seen.

>4 haydninvienna: Yes! Absolutely beautiful!

>2 MaureenRoy: My first thought after reading about Webb’s infrared sensitivity was will it be used to look for Planet 9 but wondering if that was a silly notion. Then I did a net search for Planet 9 and found that attempts to find the “ theoretical remote massive body” have been constant with successive tools becoming available, the most recent being;
https://gizmodo.com/latest-search-for-the-elusive-planet-nine-falls-short-184866...

Maybe a planet 9 search will be tasked to Webb in the future.

Wiki on Planet 9:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine

What priority would you give to the JWT’s time for this project?
I’m thinking the time is finite and there are many other projects with guaranteed returns. Non-Webb resources are available, and I’m so excited to see what Webb will show us -

>7 stellarexplorer: Yep, I agree. I am interested in the limits of the universe and looking back to near the big bang or whatever answering questions JWT was designed to throw light on. I don't know enough to prioritize Webb's projects.
However if the theory about Planet 9's orbit causing objects in the Oort cloud to rain asteroids like those that took out the dinosaurs every 100 million years or so has any credibility it might be worth confirming its existence/nonexistence .

>8 DugsBooks: Yes, and I’m not up on the status of that conjecture. I guess the more support it actually has, the higher the priority.

In looking around casually to check, I found this:

“CfA astronomer Benjamin Schmitt was a member of a large team that used the 6-meter Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile to search for Planet 9 at millimeter wavelengths. Although ACT was designed to study the cosmic microwave background radiation, its relatively high angular resolution and sensitivity makes it suitable for this type of search.

The astronomers scanned about 87% of the sky accessible from the Southern Hemisphere over a six year period, and then processed the millimeter images with a variety of techniques, including binning and stacking methods that might uncover faint sources but at the expense of losing positional information. Their search found many tentative candidate sources (about 3,500 of them) but none could be confirmed, and there were no statistically significant detections.

The scientists, however, were able to exclude with 95% confidence a Planet 9 with the above-estimated properties within the surveyed area, results that are generally consistent with other null searches for Planet 9. The results cover only about 10 to 20% of the possibilities, but other sensitive millimeter facilities are coming online and should be able to complete this search for Planet 9 as hypothesized.”

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-planet.html

So maybe there are other resources, and JWT might be useful if there’s a tempting candidate? Let’s just hope the final words on Earth’s tombstone don’t read, “What are the chances that a planet-killing asteroid happens to strike just now?”

Progress report on JWST:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/webb-telescope-s-coldest-instrument-reaches-ope...

>8 DugsBooks: …hopefully not straying too far off topic and speaking of visitors from the Oort Cloud a quote from NASA;

Hubble Confirms Largest Comet Nucleus Ever Seen
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/hubble-confirms-largest-comet-nucleus-...

“The comet has been falling toward the Sun for well over 1 million years. It is coming from the hypothesized nesting ground of trillions of comets, called the Oort Cloud. The diffuse cloud is thought to have an inner edge at 2,000 to 5,000 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth. Its outer edge might extend at least a quarter of the way out to the distance of the nearest stars to our Sun, the Alpha Centauri system”

Alignment of the JWST is now complete:

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

From Andras Gaspar on twitter, a comparison of JWST with the earlier WISE infrared telescope. Click on the GIF.

This link works for me in Firefox but not Microsoft Edge, so you may need to experiment.

>12 MaureenRoy: great description of the calibration process , nasa going a little over my head with that one
> 13 Wow, what a difference in the detail shown - from vague blurs to sharply defined objects albeit I think I read that the “starbursts” on the JWST photos are a result of the lenses. Looks great though.

The link below gives this info on Webb’s first photos. A quote:

Join us July 12 at 10:30 am ET (14:30 UTC), as Webb’s first full-color images & data are revealed one by one! Watch on
NASA’s streaming platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, DailyMotion.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/UnfoldTheUniverse?src=hashtag_click

Direct link to NASA Webb Telescope site:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/main/index.html

>15 DugsBooks: Exciting!

7/11/2022 3:20pm PDT, NASA is now live with the James Webb Space Telescope's first official set of photos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21X5lGlDOfg

Amazing

I looked at the photo at the NASA Webb Telescope site, where you can enlarge it , and it looks pretty neat. I need an annotated photo however pointing out the galaxy cluster doing the gravitational lensing and the galaxies which are enhanced thereby. But it is exciting to anticipate finding unique objects that only existed in the far past.

>19 DugsBooks: sure is, and thanks for your updates!

20 July 2022

Meteoroid hit has caused 'significant uncorrectable' damage to James Webb Space Telescope
------------------------------------
Like any spacecraft, the telescope has encountered micrometeoroids and its sensors have detected six deformations on the telescope's primary mirror panels that have been attributed to strikes.
Alexander Martin

Technology reporter AlexMartin

why is this not funny? utterly predictable and virtually inevitable?

---------------------------------------------

(22 July 2022) NASA Webb Program Director Greg Robinson Announces Retirement/b

Jul 22, 2022 - After more than 30 years of service at NASA, the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope Program Director Gregory L. Robinson is retiring on July 29.

They forgot to place the Romulan Cloaking device and the shields up around the JWST.

;^/\/ LOL!!!!

10bn USD down the spout.

>21 proximity1: That article & others state that the Webb designers anticipated the strikes and have adaptations at the ready (for most strikes at least!) - I hope they are effective. All that (so far) pales in comparison to the Hubble lens warp fiasco that required a shuttle repair visit to install the “reading glasses/ corrective lenses”.

That worked so well it makes you wonder if it was anticipated also.if they get the same mileage out of Webb as Hubble that would be a success IMOHO.

>22 DugsBooks:

No doubt that the teams which conceived, designed and built the telescopes were--had to be--acutely aware of the dangers of space matter--from dust to larger objects--striking the instruments.

from NASA's FAQ on Hubble and the JWST:

(https://www.nasa.gov/content/about-facts-hubble-faqs)
"What will happen to Hubble when the telescope is no longer operational? Will it return to Earth?"

"Hubble is not expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere until the mid to late 2030s at the earliest. Due to a force called atmospheric drag, which affects the orbits of satellites like Hubble in low-Earth orbit, Hubble’s altitude is slowly decreasing. A propulsion module will eventually be attached to the telescope to complete either a controlled reentry into the south Pacific ocean, or to boost Hubble into a much higher orbit to keep the inoperative telescope aloft for several more decades.*"

_____________________________

* that assumes that it isn't smacked hard by a large object. Of course, Hubble's orbit is continually monitored and adjusted to move it out of the way of potential collisions.
-------------------------------------

JWST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope)

"Servicing

"JWST is not intended to be serviced in space. A crewed mission to repair or upgrade the observatory, as was done for Hubble, would not currently be possible,(57) and according to NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen, despite best efforts, an uncrewed remote mission was found to be beyond current technology at the time JWST was designed.(58) During the long JWST testing period, NASA officials referred to the idea of a servicing mission, but no plans were announced.(59)(60) Since the successful launch, NASA have stated that limited accommodation was made to facilitate future servicing missions, if any. These accommodations included precise guidance markers in the form of crosses on the surface of JWST, for use by remote servicing missions, as well as refillable fuel tanks, removable heat protectors, and accessible attachment points.(61)(58)

... "Commissioning and testing

"On 12 January 2022, while still in transit, mirror alignment began. The primary mirror segments and secondary mirror were moved away from their protective launch positions. This took about 10 days, because the 132 (31) actuator motors are designed to fine-tune the mirror positions at microscopic accuracy (10 nanometer increments) and must each move over 1.2 million increments (12.5 mm) during initial alignment.(211)(33)

"Mirror alignment requires each of the 18 mirror segments, and the secondary mirror, to be positioned to within 50 nanometers. NASA compares the required accuracy by analogy: 'If the Webb primary mirror were the size of the United States, each (mirror) segment would be the size of Texas, and the team would need to line the height of those Texas-sized segments up with each other to an accuracy of about 1.5 inches'.(212)" ...

...
"Orbit design

"JWST orbits the Sun near the second Lagrange point (L2) of the Sun–Earth system, which is 1,500,000 km (930,000 mi) farther from the Sun than the Earth's orbit, and about four times farther than the Moon's orbit. Normally an object circling the Sun farther out than Earth would take longer than one year to complete its orbit. But near the L2 point, the combined gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun allow a spacecraft to orbit the Sun in the same time that it takes the Earth. Staying close to Earth allows data rates to be much faster for a given size of antenna.

"The telescope circles about the Sun–Earth L2 point in a halo orbit, which is inclined with respect to the ecliptic, has a radius varying between about 250,000 km (160,000 mi) and 832,000 km (517,000 mi), and takes about half a year to complete.(19) Since L2 is just an equilibrium point with no gravitational pull, a halo orbit is not an orbit in the usual sense: the spacecraft is actually in orbit around the Sun, and the halo orbit can be thought of as controlled drifting to remain in the vicinity of the L2 point.(167) This requires some station-keeping: around 2.5 m/s per year (168) from the total ∆v budget of 93 m/s.(169) Two sets of thrusters constitute the observatory's propulsion system. (170) Because the thrusters are located solely on the Sun-facing side of the observatory, all station-keeping operations are designed to slightly undershoot the required amount of thrust in order to avoid pushing the JWST beyond the semi-stable L2 point, a situation which would be unrecoverable. Randy Kimble, the Integration and Test Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, compared the precise station-keeping of the JWST to "Sisyphus (...) rolling this rock up the gentle slope near the top of the hill – we never want it to roll over the crest and get away from him".(171)
...

>23 proximity1: ”This took about 10 days, because the 132 (31) actuator motors are designed to fine-tune the mirror positions at microscopic accuracy (10 nanometer increments) and must each move over 1.2 million increments (12.5 mm) during initial alignment.(211)(33)”

“Nanometer increments “ via a motor is difficult for me to grasp - close to magic.

>24 DugsBooks:

the NASA techs would love to be able to multiply that accuracy by a million if they could--without suffering a commensurate delay in the adjustment-time--a real problem, that.

You'd think that other variable factors would render such a degree of accuracy simply irrelevantly too refined--that is, over distances of millions of light-years, a nanometer is less than the amount of the universe's ordinary dialation (expansion), (and, so, distortion of readings' accuracy) within even just the duration of the satellite's single Earth orbit.

In any case, so much in NASA's measurements at such distances as millions of light-years have to be estimates of time, distance, mass, magnitude, etc.

…..Sidestepping to the Hubble

SpaceX, NASA look at launching Dragon to service Hubble Space Telescope

https://www.space.com/nasa-spacex-possible-dragon-mission-hubble-space-telescope

:::edited to better title::::

Black holes all over our early universe:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-jwst-has-spotted-giant-black-holes-all-over-the-...