December 24, 2021 - 1:11pm
Something that not everyone appreciates about space missions is how long they take.
Not just the travel, although with outer-planet missions — Cassini visiting Saturn, say, or the planned 2024 Europa Clipper, off to look for life on the icy Jovian moon — the weightless fall through space takes several years. It’s the planning.
The Cassini-Huygens mission, which arrived in Saturnian space in 2004, having been launched in 1997, was originally proposed in 1982. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, announced in 2012, is scheduled to reach Ganymede in 2032. The scientists who come up with an idea for a space mission sometimes aren’t lucky to live to see them launch. At least two of those behind Clipper did not.
On Christmas Day, the James Webb Space Telescope will finally launch. It doesn’t have to tumble silently across half the solar system: it only needs to make it a million and a half kilometres from the Earth, a day trip compared to the billions needed to get to the outer planets. And it doesn’t have to worry about planetary conjunctions — if you want to get to Pluto, you need to slingshot around the other planets to get up speed, and you need the planets in certain positions to do that. (New Horizons, which got to Pluto in 2015, had to launch in January 2006, and if it didn’t, its $800 million budget would have been wasted.) The James Webb can just head off in the right direction for a month or so to reach its destination, with minimal fancy orbital mechanics required.
But despite all that, it has taken the JWST more than 30 years to get from drawing board to launch pad.
That is why scientists are all so excited when their rockets blast off or when their orbiters reach their destination. It’s because they’ve dedicated literally half their career to that moment. I spoke to some involved in the Cassini mission who talk about the nerve-racking seconds when their tiny, delicate, instrument-filled baby is plonked on top of a 50-metre-tall barrel of explosive and fired at many times the speed of sound into the black. The JWST, all $8 billion’s worth, the culmination of the careers of dozens of space scientists, a marvel of technology centred around a six-metre-wide, micron-scale-precision-engineered, beryllium-and-gold telescope mirror, will have to survive forces four times that of Earth’s gravity as its Ariane 5 rocket takes off.
But if it gets into space intact, there will be plenty more to be excited about. The JWST’s huge mirror, six times as large as the Hubble space telescope’s, will be able to collect the faintest glimmers of light. It will stare back in time to the start of the universe, at galaxies whose light has taken 13 billion years to reach us; and, excitingly, it will stare at planets orbiting other stars, and will be able to see the light from those stars reach us through the atmosphere of those planets.
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SubscribeIt’s an exciting moment. Presumably it may end up gathering data which forces us to view things differently to how we do now.
I love these space exploration projects. I’m still enjoying the images from the Mars Perseverance rover. Incredible to think I’m looking at high-res pictures (ok, computer-enhanced pictures) of the Martian surface.
I hope all goes well for the JWST.
I have a scientific bent, but I do wonder at times of a big ticket item, how much more profitable it would have been for the human race to properly explore our own planet, to fully understand how it works and to help the earth and it’s protective atmosphere truly thrive for us all.
The near earth orbit technology is certainly useful, but do we really need to know what happened at the big bang (and much inbetween)? How about all that skill and inventiveness put towards power generation & storage, water desalination and purification, leaps ahead in plant husbandry. Perhaps solving the perennial destabilisation by warrior governments, where the UN has proven impotent.
Perhaps it is not just about knowing different things, but that there are expensive areas we simply do not need to know about yet. So we should try do other things that benefit people here on earth, far more directly.
Perhaps a bit short sighted, because many of the technological developments that needed to be made will benefit more mundane pursuits on earth.
Let’s see if it successfully deploys first. The result could be world changing if it works but I suspect there is a significant probability of its failing to deploy given all its moving parts and the possibility of vacuum fusing, malfunctioning callibration, shaking during launch damaging the optics etc. It’s enough to make any engineer break out in a cold sweat.
All true, but the same was also said of the spectacular and technically challenging Mars rover missions.
Although the fact that NASA is left helpless should anything go wrong this time only adds to the tension and excitement.
I just can’t comprehend all this; can someone please explain?
The Big Bang was c.14 billion years ago. Earth came into existence c.4.5bn years ago. We’re now sending up a telescope to capture light/radio signals from the Big Bang, So, in an instant (?) the universe grew from a speck to something spanning hundreds or thousands of light years from end to end. Lots of variables.
How do we know how old the light we catch is? Do we really know all this stuff? How do we know how big the universe was when this light which we’re looking for started out, and where we are/were when it started out. I’ve read the Stephen Hawkins books, and regularly fell off the page when it got difficult. How hard is it to understand at least the basis of this project?
Good for you for showing an interest. How do we know? Well, in the same kind of way that you know the bridge you’re driving over is not about to collapse or the plane you’re flying in is not going to fall out of the sky. Because a lot of people have spent a lot of time and effort making sure that the bridge/aeroplane is as safe as it can be.Nothing is perfect. Same for the Big Bang theory. Science and engineering are much more about perspiration than inspiration. Everything is checked and double checked … and most importantly when things do go wrong – because we didn’t understand something – diligently investigated to find out the cause. In this way science inches its way towards the truth.