The Most Advanced Telescope in History.

Hello friends, it is already Christmas and we did not see the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope because it has been postponed again for this December 25 from French Guiana, which can become a nice Christmas gift for the scientific community and nerds in general who we have waited for this moment many many years.

There is no way to express the expectation that exists at this moment about the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble and the next generation of space telescopes, the project that for years bleed NASA's budget and for which other projects died; it cost $ 10 billion more than six times the original budget and was 14 years late.

A technological marvel for which many technologies had to be developed that did not exist at the time it was designed, with its great golden eye six times larger and with the ability to look further back in time that Hubble promises as it did. its predecessor reveal amazing things about the universe its origin its composition and the evolution of galaxies, stars and extrasolar planets in ways that we cannot even imagine and that will change the way we understand the universe and our own existence.

For me it is only the end of waiting for this beautiful and sophisticated object that will show us incredible images, but for the people who worked more than 20 years on it, it is their life, their legacy is the materialization of the effort and work of hundreds. of people for many years who will travel to their destination in space by means of something so violent that it could be defined as a controlled explosion, so much cleaning so much care so much meticulousness to end up putting it on top of a rocket full of fuel that will burn like itself sun, but that's what we got.

But if something reassures me, it is that the rocket in which the ARIANE 5 will be launched, one of the most reliable, with an almost perfect record of 95.5% reliability, of its 111 launches, 106 were successful, the problem lies in the almost. Abrir en Google Tr

Although the wait is close to ending, the risky and extremely violent launch is only one more step for this telescope to achieve its objective, from the moment it leaves the earth it will begin to unfold and unfold all its parts and that in itself is A risk, to reach its final configuration, 144 release mechanisms need to be activated over several months, in these there are 344 points of failure, add the possibility of being destroyed in the middle of a fireball during launch so that the entire mission fails .

This is all so complicated for various reasons, size is one of them, their 6.5 meter diameter primary mirror literally would not fit inside any rocket available today, they solved this by dividing it into 18 hexagonal elements mounted on a structure that can be folded in three to fit inside the ARIANE 5, the rocket with the highest capacity that exists today, this also reduced its weight which is important because this telescope is not going to go into a low orbit like the Hubble that traveling 550 kilometers up, the james webb will go further to a point of gravitational balance between the sun and the earth called the lagrange point 2 at one and a half million kilometers almost four times the distance from the earth to the moon and to be taken there it has to weigh 40 percent less than Hubble.

At this point the james webb will keep describing an ellipse while hiding his delicate sensors of the sun, the earth and the moon by means of huge parasols that reflect both light and heat, with the thickness of a hair these flexible sheets of specially coated plastic With aluminum, they are one of the weak points of the telescope due to the complexity involved in deploying them from their folded configuration like Origami to fit in the rocket, to their final form extended and in tension covering the area equivalent to a tennis court.

If one of these umbrellas fails and is not deployed correctly it would expose the sensors on the far side of the telescope to the infrared radiation emitted by the sun, the earth and the moon, dazzling them and leaving the telescope unusable, this because the james webb is in It is essentially an infrared observatory, for that reason the hidden side of the telescope must always remain at a maximum temperature of 50 degrees Kelvin or 223 degrees Celsius below zero, if the temperature will increase the radiation infrared emitted by the same telescope would hinder the observations to be able to stay so cold has a cooling system that collects the heat from the sensitive components and eliminates it by means of radiators located on the side facing the sun together with the photovoltaic panels that provide the electricity telescope to function.

Let's hope tomorrow the best that humanity has given in space telescopes, that nothing fails, that everything merges fully and that it is a nice Christmas gift for humanity.

Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about #science, #planet, #politics, #rights #crypto, #traveling and discovering secrets and beauties of the #universe, feel free to Follow me as these are the topics I write about the most. Have a wonderful day and stay on this great platform :) :)

! The truth will set us free and science is the one that is closest to the truth!