Credit: NASA.
The NASA-led James Webb Space Telescope, which includes hardware designed and built at the University College London, is scheduled to be launched into space later this month.
The Ariane rocket will carry the telescope from French Guiana on or after Friday 24 December. It will take 30 days for the telescope to reach the Lagrange point 2, a million miles from Earth. The first to analyse its observations of the Universe will be the astronomer at the University College London.
The mission is expected to make breakthrough discoveries in all fields of astronomy by investigating the light of the Universe at invisible wavelength.
A team at the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory designed and built a key piece of hardware for one of the telescope's four instruments. The NIRSpec is about the size of a double bed.
The Calibration Source consists of 11 mini-telescopes that project light into a sphere and produce an even illumination of the NIRSpec detectors.
The sensitivity and arrangement of every part of NIRSpec's equipment allows for more precise measurement of the properties of light emitted by planets, stars and galaxies.
Professor Mark Cropper said that the launch of James Webb was a landmark moment for science. Between 1997 and 2010 the contribution was 14 years long. The Calibration Source aims to make sure that the faintest signals from the early Universe are measured precisely. It shows the different sensitivities of different parts of the detectors by flooding them with uniform light. Calculating the age and motions of the oldest stars and the properties of the oldest galaxies will be aided by this.
Chris Brockley- Blatt, who managed the project at the UCL, said that he was delighted that the component built at the laboratory would be playing a role in one of the major scientific endeavors of the 21st century.
Between 2005 and 2010 was when the final work to design and build the component took place. The scientists and engineers from the University of London built a larger replica of the unit together with other equipment so that NIRSpec could be tested at minus 30 degrees.
The evolution of the first stars, galaxies and black holes will be studied by Professor Richard Ellis and Dr. Aayush Saxena.
Professor Ellis, who was the only Europe-based member of the 1995 "HST and beyond" strategic committee that proposed what would later be known as the James Webb Space Telescope, said: "This is a hugely exciting development!" After 25 years of hard work by hundreds of scientists and engineers, we are about to witness a revolution in observational astronomy comparable to that achieved by the famous Hubble Space Telescope. Cosmic dawn is the time when the universe first emerged from darkness. We believe that this important event occurred between 250 and 350 million years after the Big bang, when the universe was only 2% of its present age and James Webb was able to observe it.
Professor Michael Barlow is an astronomer with the University College London, and he is a member of the European Science Team for the mid-infrared imager. He is leading a programme of observations of a remnant of a star that exploded.
A new space telescope to uncover secrets of Universe's origins was retrieved fromphys.org on December 18.
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