“Merry Christmas! We got you a new telescope.” So said a tweet from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration after the Christmas Day launch of the long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope.
Built by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the telescope soared aloft folded like high-tech origami inside the nose cone of an Ariane rocket fired from the European spaceport near the equator in South America. The telescope has been plagued by years of delays and cost overruns that ballooned its price tag to $10 billion, but that figure is still much less than the nearly $40 billion that Americans spend on pizza each year, and it is dwarfed by the more than $750 billion yearly U.S. military budget. The Webb telescope is expected to function for about 10 years as it beams back images and data from its faraway perch a million miles from Earth.
The fiery launch of the unmanned craft was just the first of hundreds of hurdles that must be cleared before the instrument is finally deployed and its “first light” pictures are beamed back to scientists next summer. Much could still go wrong between now and then, but scientists are cautiously optimistic that the instrument could revolutionize our view of the cosmos with its power to peer back billions of light years to the early beginnings of our universe after the Big Bang that started it all nearly 14 billion years ago.
Named for a former NASA chief, the Webb telescope is a worthy successor to the Hubble Space Telescope presently orbiting our planet. The Hubble ‘scope, named for pioneering astronomer Edwin Hubble, was the butt of jokes when it was found to have a defective magnifying mirror after it was launched aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1990. Visiting astronauts later repaired and modernized the Hubble in its accessible orbit a few hundred miles above Earth. Since the Webb telescope will be placed a million miles away, it can receive no visits from repair crews. Scientists have to get it right on the first try. and to their relief, the ‘scope’s mirror and sunshade deployed successfully..
Astronomers have long dreamed of having telescopes far above the haze and pollution of Earth’s atmosphere. As far back as 1837, German scientists wrote about building an observatory on the moon. In 1946—years before Russia’s Sputnik became the first orbiting satellite in 1957—American scientist Lyman Spitzer proposed putting a space telescope in orbit around Earth. Space telescopes like the Hubble and the Webb are scientists’ dreams come true.
The Hubble has a magnifying mirror about eight feet across, and its successor, the Webb ‘scope, has a colossal mirror more than 21 feet wide—much larger than the mirror of California’s Mount Palomar telescope, which for decades was the largest telescope in the world. Other ground-based telescopes today are larger than Palomar, but the Webb Space Telescope may eclipse them all if it works as scientists hope.
Today in America there is a benighted movement against science spearheaded by climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and religious fundamentalists. Astrology is a silly pseudoscience embraced by millions of Americans, and almost every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column, while almost none have regular columns on the science of astronomy. Scientist Carl Sagan was correct when he warned that, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” Though he died long before the presidency of Donald Trump, Sagan also warned of a nation “bamboozled” and “no longer interested in finding out the truth.” He cautioned that, “Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
In 1959, when I was 12 years old, I got a telescope for Christmas. Viewing the craters of the moon, the cloud belts of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn through that telescope, my young mind was filled with the emotions of awe and wonder that we so need today. Perhaps during this new year, the Webb telescope could kindle those much-needed emotions in America and around planet Earth. As Sagan said, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
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