The Webb Telescope

@sonhouse said
@bunnyknight
It was ten bil for this one. The Hub cost about 2 billion so ten or so of them will cost about 20 billion.

Designing and building a single car costs millions of dollars; mass producing that same car can drop the cost per car by orders of magnitude.
Same effect applies to televisions, toasters and telescopes.

I'd love to see what a telescope with 10,000x the resolution of Hubble can do.

SONHOUSE...please play the lottery every day...if u win, u can buy the Plane-wave 1 meter Alt-AZ telescope. Put it in yur back yard...

@ogb
Just ONE? We need a HUNDRED of them all hooked together......

@sonhouse said
Then you have to ask what kind of launch vehicle you want to use.

That one, at least, was obvious. And it delivered, yet again.

As for the cost... foo and puffle. The damn thing costs ten milliard (billion, for you innumerate colonials) dollars or, give or take, euros. And that is in total, for all countries involved, for the entire more-or-less-two-decade mission.

That's less than what my country, the poorly, pathetic Netherlands, spends on the war machine - sorry, industrial-military complex - sorry, I'm being told to call it the entirely necessary non-agressive defense budget - in a single effing year!

Yeah, I rather think it's worth its weight in gold heat-shielding. Rather that, than yet another bloody Joint Strike Fighter which isn't even flying in Europe, let alone out to a Lagrange point!

@Shallow-Blue
I would love to see a THOUSAND Milliards spent on space. I would like to see them work out interstellar craft, fusion? whatever, get them up to at least half the speed of light so we can get the hell out of THIS solar system, maybe find interesting planets around Alpha Centauri system.

I like the fact it is the closest triple star system so if we can manage a half c propulsion system we get three stars for the price of one.

It is kind of sticking out there like the Moon is for exploration, hard to not notice it is there🙂

There is another potential problem here; this L2 point in space may have stuff floating around which has been collected over a billion years. What if they turn on the telescope and their view of stars is totally blocked by an ancient wreck of an alien starship? Can you imagine how angry and upset the astronomers would be!

@bunnyknight
You kind of overestimate the amount of debris out there, trust me, it is 99.9999999% empty and the stuff would not be going fast, it is like a fake planet in space, a confluence of gravity potentials makes it SEEM like there is a mass there but is no mass except for debris it caught, which won't be much.

In all those billions of years the space between planets tends to get cleaned out by dust, asteroids, meteors and such, crash into a planet, or collect together gravitationally making a bigger chunk and all but most of the stuff gets captured by a planet or large asteroid.

Pretty empty, don't forget, it is plowing through space faster than Earth escape velocity and hasn't hit anything yet🙂

@sonhouse said
You kind of overestimate the amount of debris out there, trust me, it is 99.9999999% empty

In other words, those of Douglas Adams: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

@sonhouse said
@bunnyknight
You kind of overestimate the amount of debris out there, trust me, it is 99.9999999% empty

My cat totally disagrees. She said that space is 99.9999999% full of stuff, including old shoes, pizza boxes, cat fur balls, cat dreams, photons and dark matter.

@ponderable said
The NASA-Site (https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html) says it is unfolding its forward sun shields.

So we are on schedule.

Such a cool site. The 'scope is currently 522,000 miles from Earth. Hot side is 136 degrees fahrenheit and the cold side is -314 degrees fahrenheit. Unbelievable engineering to make that work in a single object.

Scientists are clamoring for time on this thing. We should have at least 3 of them out there, given the answerable questions and possibility of malfunction/failure.

@wildgrass
How about 3 separated by a thousand miles (not sure how far you can go with this) and sync them together, three times the light gathering power of ONE Webb, and 1600Km apart, that smells like about 8 MICROarcseconds of res. THAT would be something, eh.

@sonhouse said
@wildgrass
How about 3 separated by a thousand miles (not sure how far you can go with this) and sync them together, three times the light gathering power of ONE Webb, and 1600Km apart, that smells like about 8 MICROarcseconds of res. THAT would be something, eh.

In fact I would like to have the other at L1 and create a gigantic parallax to measure far into space.

@Ponderable
Maybe in space we can extend the resolution with phasing and the like but here on Earth they are having problems extending that to just a couple hundred meters. The signals are not sent through air, but through fiber optic cables so it is not atmosphere that disrupts the phase quality of the optical signals coming from each scope.

Would be great though, I thought of the same thing, but put scopes around the perifery of Mars orbit or something, that would give you plenty of solar energy to run stuff but a base of several hundred million km, but so far I think just a dream.

The complexity of the Webb scope is amazing. While it was impossible to build redundancy plans, there was major work done in regards to contingency plans for all the points of failure. Looks like the sun shield is now deployed, and there were several items checked off the list on that one.

https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-deployment-points-of-failure

We are now 538,000 miles out with 360,000 miles to go. All is well so far!

@Liljo
That was a biggie, getting the shield up, without that NOTHING else works, might as well throw up a Walmart 100 dollar telescope....

I wish I had enough bucks to launch my own telescope, say only half the size of Hubble, even that would give some 1/10 arc second res and I would be the one doing the looking🙂

Hub clocks in at about 1/20th arc second res, 1 arc second parses a circle into 1,296,000 parts so 20 times that for Hub, parses a circle into near 26 MILLION bits, and Webb will do 14 times that I think which parses a circle into 600 Million bits, quite an improvement if and when it starts producing useable data.

So if you visualize a circle, then cut it into finer and finer bits, starting with 1 million or so, close to one arc second of res, to 600 million bits around a circle which means it would spot stuff 600 times smaller than a scope with 1 arc second res.