Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Wow. Just...wow. "NASA's revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope reaches final orbit in space"
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/24/22895050/nasa-jwst-space-telescope-final-orbit-lagrange-pointAfter traveling hundreds of thousands of miles through space over the last month, NASA’s revolutionary new James Webb Space Telescope performed its last big course correction maneuver this afternoon, putting itself into its final resting place in space. Now, the observatory will live in perpetuity at a distance of roughly 1 million miles from the Earth, giving the vehicle a front-row view of the most ancient stars and galaxies of the Universe.
Launched on Christmas Day, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, has had a wild ride to its destination. Too enormous to fly to space in its final form, the telescope had to launch folded up inside its rocket. Once it reached space, JWST began an extremely complex routine of shape-shifting and unfurling, a type of choreography that no spacecraft had ever performed before. Yet JWST performed every step flawlessly, completing its major deployments on January 8th and blossoming into its full configuration.
Plenty of anxiety surrounded those deployments, as they had to work as planned; one failure could have jeopardized JWST’s entire mission. But the mission team’s unease didn’t end when unfurling was complete. JWST still had to get into its final position in space in order to do its job properly. If the observatory didn’t slow down just right today, the vehicle ran the risk of getting into the wrong orbit or missing its target trajectory completely. Such a failure could have complicated the mission’s future, making it incredibly difficult for scientists to communicate with the nearly $10 billion space observatory.
Fortunately, JWST performed this last maneuver flawlessly. “During the past month, JWST has achieved amazing success and is a tribute to all the folks who spent many years and even decades to ensure mission success,” Bill Ochs, the JWST project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statemen
Snip
This just remarkable, just brilliant - and...science! Shows what our species CAN do (such a contrast to what we've see lately in the world in so many awful examples).
48 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
C’MON JW, LET’S SEE SOME PICTURES!!!
shows how it slips into L2 orbit. The midcourse corrections were done halfway out, so that it mostly just finishes arriving and...settles into its L2 orbit with the rest of the equipment mankind has parked there.
Thanks for the thread NewHendoLib.
that you, TFG?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/james-webb-space-telescope-reaches-orbit-destination-nasa/
Good question--I had to look it up, too!
For the rest of its operational life, Webb will circle L2 at distances between 155,000 and 517,000 miles, taking six months to complete one orbit. Because the orbit around L2 is not perfectly stable, small thruster firings will be carried out every three weeks or so to maintain the telescope's trajectory.
Good question--I had to look it up, too!
But people on this thread seemed so knowledgeable I thought most of them would know.
Did the same. Been chasing it several times a day since the
Launch. Checking ISS several times also And spend way too
much time on my favourite site DU Did the countdown also
A totally amazing feat altogether by all concerned .
Seriously,
The Radiation Era
10,000 years
The first major era in the history of the universe is one in which most of the energy is in the form of radiation -- different wavelengths of light, X rays, radio waves and ultraviolet rays. This energy is the remnant of the primordial fireball, and as the universe expands, the waves of radiation are stretched and diluted until today, they make up the faint glow of microwaves which bathe the entire universe.
Beginning the Era of Matter Domination
300,000 years
At this moment, the energy in matter and the energy in radiation are equal. But as the relentless expansion continues, the waves of light are stretched to lower and lower energy, while the matter travels onward largely unaffected. At about this time, neutral atoms are formed as electrons link up with hydrogen and helium nuclei. The microwave background radiation hails from this moment, and thus gives us a direct picture of how matter was distributed at this early time.
Birth of Stars and Galaxies
300 million years
Gravity amplifies slight irregularities in the density of the primordial gas. Even as the universe continues to expand rapidly, pockets of gas become more and more dense. Stars ignite within these pockets, and groups of stars become the earliest galaxies. This point is still perhaps 12 to 15 billion years before the present.
http://patrickgrant.com/BBTL.htm
How far back will Webb see? Webb will be able to see what the universe looked like around a quarter of a billion years (possibly back to 100 million years) after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies started to form.
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faqLite.html
then seeing the full post "back in time"... and "...6000 yrs"
Now I do. 
Ty for sharing, NHL!
Congrats NASA, congrats Human Species.
