Picture Of The Day January 7, 2009 - Full Scale Webb Space Telescope


Courtesy NASA   ↔

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Members of the Webb team at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland pose in front of the full-scale Webb telescope model.

The new James Webb NASA site is now available here.  Highly recommended.


This incredible instrument is scheduled for launch in 2013.

Impressive as hell!! I can't wait to start seeing results from it. I guess they did decide to have it orbiting earth, though farther out than the moon. I seem to remember some discussion of having it at one of the other stable orbit points (LaGrange points?) orbiting the sun in the same orbit as earth. Any idea what happened to that discussion? Or, am I remembering incorrectly?

You're correct.  Some initial discussions were "for" a solar orbit at one of the LaGrange points, but for some reason that idea was discarded.  A million mile orbit about the Earth/Moon system turns out to be no small feat.  And the Webb by golly better last for a long time, there's not any way to go up and repair it.  To me, that's the most risky part of the whole mission.

Remember the public outcry when the govt. tried to scuttle the Hubble repair?  What a nightmare for those idiots responsible for that brilliant decision.

Astronomers are sure getting some nice tools.

Exploration of Mars {ed: why it is important} 45:17 minutes


This is real good and I can't believe this kind of information is not on NASA home page. Especially now with The Panel on Exploration trying to not do mars-on-the-cheap & give Obama a useful report.