The authoritative Space magazine reports that twenty years of work on the creation and construction of the James Webbs telescope have ended. This telescope should replace the Hubble.
The device turned out to be big. And to connect these two halves, it took a special crane. All work was done in California based on Northrop Grumman.
According to William Ochs, an employee of the space flight office. Goddard’s in Greenbelt, USA, the final assembly of the apparatus, solar panel and carrier ship is a huge achievement for the team. Now NASA has a modern and very powerful orbiting observatory. The achievement is the result of the efforts of thousands of representatives from NASA, the European and Canadian space agencies, Northrop Grumman, as well as all partners.
The completion of the project was made possible thanks to the efforts of workers from seventeen countries. The launch of the telescope should take place in 2021. The Arian-5 rocket will launch it into orbit.
After that, the possibilities of scientists in space exploration will rise to a fundamentally new level. The near-Earth observatory will become the most powerful, largest and most complex of all ever existed and launched vehicles.
The idea to put a new telescope into orbit, which would collect all the data in the infrared spectrum, was born by progressive scientists in about the 90s of the last century. The launch of this telescope was originally planned for 2007. However, it was constantly delayed 10 times (the last - in June 2018).
It was then that scientists from NASA announced that the launch of the telescope into orbit should take place in 2021, presumably in the spring. This was due to malfunctions detected during the final test.
The observatory will be located on a haloorbite at the Lagrange point, in the Sun-Earth system. The spacecraft will have to retire about one and a half million kilometers from our planet. But before this happens, the developers still have a lot of work to do to set up the telescope. He will not be in orbit by the indicated date, if during the final test there is any flaw.
The data obtained by this powerful telescope will probably reveal many secrets that the Universe is fraught with.
