There will be a public event on Friday at 7:20 a.m. A rocket is scheduled to launch from South America and carry the James Webb Space Telescope. The space telescope will be the most powerful eye in the sky once it is aloft, and it will be able to see everything from the earliest stars to life in distant solar systems.
The live launch coverage in English starts at 6 a.m. The time is after 11 pm. You can watch the launch on NASA's website and social media accounts. Spanish language coverage will start at 6:30 a.m. NASA representatives said in a statement that the agency's website and YouTube account are available.
You can check in at our sister site Space.com all week to get the latest updates on the launch.
There are photos of the James Webb Space Telescope.
There are some good videos for you.
The international partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency is expected to last five to 10 years. The Ariane 5 rocket will be used to launch the telescope from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and is still active, but the new JWST will observe objects in the universe to help answer questions about the formation of the universe. Over the past 30 years, Hubble has captured amazing images of planets, stellar nurseries, colorful nebulas and clusters of galaxies.
While Hubble did most of its observations in the UV and optical wavelength, the JWST will mostly operate in the IR. Hubble has a smaller mirror, which will capture more light. Hubble could not provide a detailed view of the universe's earliest objects.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be launched on December 24. The image is from NASA GSFC/CIL.
A million miles away.
NASA says the new address will be "L2," a destination nearly a million miles away from its home planet. The abbreviation refers to the second lagrange point, which is one of the five points in our solar system. At each Lagrange Point, the pull of Earth and the sun match, so a satellite can be "parked" in a stable spot where it won't need much fuel to stay in a fixed position.
It is located in the opposite direction from the sun.
The L2 position is good for the telescope. Being far away from the sun will help the telescope to spot dim, distant objects. NASA can establish continuous communication with the telescope through the Deep Space Network because it will live at a fixed address. The array of giant radio antennas is scattered across three facilities that are separated from each other by 120 degrees, so that the array can maintain contact with satellites and interplanetary missions as Earth rotates, according to NASA.
Sending the telescope to a place that is so far away means that astronauts won't be able to fix it, as they could with Hubble. Hubble was built to be easy to service, and NASA conducted five repair missions between 1993 and 2009, but that option won't be possible for JW.
In the early days of the project, studies were conducted to evaluate the benefits, practicality and cost of servicing the project by human space flight, robotic missions, or some combination. The studies concluded that the potential benefits of servicing do not offset the increased mission complexity, mass and cost that would be required to make Webb serviceable or to conduct the servicing mission itself.
If everything goes well, the new address will be reached within a day and the sun shield will be deployed in a week. After six months, the telescope will perform its first observations and mission engineers will remotely align and calibrate the instruments.
Live Science published the original article.
