Hubble telescope's successor

In 2014, James Webb Space Telescope will be launched into space, the great career succession of the Hubble Space Telescope has reached retirement age.

Almost twice as big as Hubble, James Webb will be the largest space telescope ever built. To put it on the universe, James Webb's 6.5 m radius of sunlight and converging mirrors will be folded in a closed chamber, like a pupa, placed on the top floor of the rocket. to push. Once in orbit, James Webb will burst like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon.

In the figure, the entire research team designed and fabricated them together with the James Webb space telescope model, at NASA's Goddard Space Center.

James Webb is an infrared telescope, designed to hunt for small, faint objects, or stars that emit light to the infrared band, or objects that are obscured by explosions in the universe. In order to reduce noise, affecting the resulting image, James Webb has a filter that prevents the effects of infrared waves, emitted from the sun, including five filtered films, made of a compound between aluminum and polymer. The shape of these filtered films makes Jon Arenberg, of Northrop Grumman Corporation, jokingly call high-tech chips.

In the picture, a sample filter film (smaller than 1/3 of the real filter film) is stretched, serving the experiment.

The convergence of James Webb is a collection of 18 hexagonal mirrors, each with a diameter of 1.3 m, made from beri. The back of each piece of glass is worn with acid, to avoid foreign metals that can attach. These 18 mirrors will focus 7-8 times more light than the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope (only 2.4 meters in diameter).

In the picture, six hexagonal mirror pieces were assembled in a quality inspection, performed at the Marshall Center (NASA).

James Webb will be put on orbit 1.5 million kilometers away from the earth. In that place, the gravity between the earth and the sun acts on it, the glass is balanced.

The Hubble telescope was renewed and had to be repaired five times during his 'term'. However, the post-trafficking intervention for James Webb is very difficult. With a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, it is not easy if scientists want to repair, replace or upgrade the telescope. Therefore, researchers have set many hypothetical situations to ensure James Webb fulfills its mission.

In the picture, astronauts are fixing Hubble's mirror during the first failure.

Until now, the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang came before the first star formed a blank chapter (called the Dark Age). Scientists expect James Webb's ability to observe will open up information about this phase.