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There's a Christmas every year. A major telescope launch is apparently once a generation.
by mabbo 5y ago
There's a Christmas every year. A major telescope launch is apparently once a generation.
- Buttons840 5y agoYeah. I commented to my family that this telescope took multiple countries years to build. I'm not sure if it's just that difficult, or if budgets are too small.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoThe JWST has a number of trailblazing technologies. Real Engineering did a great video on it: https://youtu.be/aICaAEXDJQQ https://youtu.be/aICaAEXDJQQ
- sandworm101 5y ago>> apparently once a generation I hope not. This one is only going to last 10 years. Kepler also only lasted 10 years. Given the time it took to build it, I hope the JWST's replacement is already well into development. The reality is that space telescopes are launched every couple years without much fanfare. This just happens to be a very big and expensive one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes
- rjn 5y agoonly reason for 10 years is fuel, I think they are working on a robot to refuel it to increase the lifetime.
- gibolt 5y agoHopefully this restraint will become less significant for future missions. Starship should mean larger payload volume (less folding/structure required), far more payload capacity, far lower costs, and more frequent flights. Refueling and refurbishment costs should become much more acceptable as viable approaches emerge due to dropping ticket cost to space.
- throwawayboise 5y agoWhat's a generation? Longer than 10 years certainly, but many people have kids by their early 20s if not before.
- pvorb 5y agoI think typically a generation is around 30 years, but this changes over time. Currently it's higher in the western world, but it was shorter 100 years ago.
- ido 5y agoSo why couldn’t they delay the lunch by a week so everyone could spend Christmas with their families and then launch it?
- skapadia 5y agoThe launching of this telescope is FAR more important and beneficial to humanity than an arbitrary holiday that celebrates the winter solstice.
- kenneth 5y agoChristmas doesn't celebrate the winter solstice, it happens to be a few days after the winter solstice. In some places, the solstice is far more important holiday than Christmas, like for Buddhists in HK where I live, who celebrate the solstice with family
- hahajk 5y agoThere very specific times you can launch to establish desired orbits. Typically these windows only come once every month or two.
- dnautics 5y agoIs that the case for an orbit around the earth-sun Lagrange point? It seems like anytime should be GTG
- sandworm101 5y agoTrue. I don't think this is an orbital launch window thing. Rather, the date seemed to be driven by operational necessities (range safety, weather, the practicalities of getting the rocket ready etc).
- jonas21 5y agoI believe the launch windows are fairly constrained due to the precise positioning requirements as well as the requirement to avoid eclipses throughout the lifetime of the telescope. This study [1] was for a planned 2018 launch, but I'm sure there were similar constraints in this time period too. In addition, the fuel required to position the spacecraft varies a lot depending on the day - and any fuel saved can be used to prolong the operational lifetime of the telescope. [1] https://issfd.org/ISSFD_2014/ISSFD24_Paper_S2-6_Yu.pdf https://issfd.org/ISSFD_2014/ISSFD24_Paper_S2-6_Yu.pdf
- mobilefriendly 5y agoLet's hope Starship lift capacity will make Webb obsolete in a decade!
- eganist 5y agoDoubtful considering how long it took to put JWST together. What, 30 years almost? Granted a lot of that was scope creep but nonetheless, I'm betting it's not launch capacity that's the bottleneck.
- Kye 5y agoThe available launch vehicles probably demanded a certain amount of ambition in the plans. You can't launch small experimental telescopes with a short planned operation on the shuttle. It's too expensive just to show up with anything less than Hubble's successor. Now the new space race is aiming at making access to space cheap and common. Whatever follows probably won't be a big telescope. It'll be all the little experiments that couldn't find funding over those 30 years because there was nothing to launch them without breaking the budget. There's a lot of progress deferred because every launch had to be big.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoFast, cheap and out of control!
- sandworm101 5y ago>> probably won't be a big telescope. It will be another infrared telescope. Hubble's capabilities have been all but surpassed by ground-based optics. Some of the new giant telescopes already being built will easily surpass Hubble (100+foot mirrors etc). What JWST does is see in infrared, something that ground-based telescopes can never do as IR is absorbed by atmosphere. So whatever replaces JWST will likely be another, bigger, IR telescope. https://www.tmt.org/page/about https://www.tmt.org/page/about >>With its 30m diameter prime-mirror, TMT will be three times as wide, with nine times more area, than the largest currently existing visible-light telescope in the world. This will provide an unparalleled resolution, with TMT images more than 12 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.