James Webb

HOLY MOLY
CHECKED

thank you user

A launch failure is very unlikely, something not working during deployment is far more likely. I work with some people who worked on JWST going back to when it was NGST and one of them was was on the ESA panel that decided what they would contribute. He was dead against ESA launching it because he said "people will either remember it was an ESA launch for 5 minutes or forever and either way it won't be good."

Currently involved in 2 ERS proposals but neither of them will be accepted.

...

It's going to blow up.

(((They))) don't want you to know the truth.

Praise Kek for keeping our telescope safe

...

>won't see visible light
into the trash it goes!

Can't explode on the launch pad if you don't use SpaceX

...

thank you Kek
bless our stuff in spess

Whoever approved of it needs to be fucked. With the money you could have build 100m diameter telescope on earth, which a) would be more much capable as a telescope, b) does not hold the risk to explode, which would make the whole work and money go to shit and c) can be easily repaired if something brakes.

But no, fucking NASA needed their prestige project and now the scientific community might be left with nothing if anything fails.

I would be legit sad if this blew on the pad

...

>something not working during deployment is far more likely

I've been part of the team that developed a satellite mission, that thing took off, no problems. Fairing didn't fully open. Ah well. It's not like I've sunk a decade into this.

>With the money you could have build 100m diameter telescope on earth

Not a telescope expert, but I do believe atmospheric issues do limit the effectivity of i.e. the spectrometer and so on. Also, you can just point the JWST to a target for days and let it collect photons..

>With the money you could have build 100m diameter telescope on earth
While true in terms of cost the money was earmarked for NASA. NASA doesn't do ground based astronomy (apart from a few small occasions) so it couldn't have spent the money on a ground based telescope. JWST will still be very productive and it has some advantages over a 100m telescope. When ESO studied OWL it also wasn't a 100% that the whole thing would work.

>Not a telescope expert, but I do believe atmospheric issues do limit the effectivity of i.e. the spectrometer and so on. Also, you can just point the JWST to a target for days and let it collect photons..
On the second point you can't actually do that long exposures in space, cosmic rays ruin everything so you have to do sub exposures. At that point there is no difference in observing constantly or coming back night after night. Ground based telescopes actually have an advantage here because the always get newer detectors with lower read-noise so the penalty for sub exposures is lower.
On the former point the atmosphere does limit sensitivity, by both degrading the resolution and increasing the background. The resolution issue has been solved on the ground using adaptive optics, it's not perfect but it's rapidly improving. On the point about backgorund ground based telescopes can make up for this by being much, much larger. When it comes to comparison with the 39 meter European Extremely Large Telescope JWST will be more sensitive at very long wavelengths and in imaging. E-ELT however will be more sensitive at short wavelengths, more sensitive in spectroscopy and it will have much higher resolution. E-ELT will also do a lot of things JWST doesn't have the instruments for. Space telescopes certainly have their merits but not as many as people commonly think.

It should have been built on the moon base. Then a couple guys could have kicked it into orbit.

>100 meter telescope on earth

What a huge waste that would be.

Not really. It was studied by the European Southern Observatory, it would cost perhaps half of JWST and it would be able to do lots of things JWST can't. It would outperform JWST at shorter wavelengths by a mile. It would also do the visible which JWST doesn't. It would have been capable of easily detecting earth like planets around sun like stars, even studying their atmospheres with direct imaging. It would be capable (if a stable enough spectrograph can be built) of directly measuring the expansion of the universe over a decade or two. Assuming the adaptive optics system worked well it could have up to 30 times the resolution of JWST. It would be quite an instrument if it all worked.

I'd rather they built 1,000s of 100 meter telescopes in space in one big ass array.

It's the "ifs" and "assumings" that concern me.

If we're getting to choose, I'd take that as well.

Either:
1) You're a complete fucking idiot.
or
2) This is bait.

pls make it to L2 and deploy perfectly
>blessed be the JWST

mfw it hits the firmament

It's true that the atmosphere creates lower resolution and higher background, but you are forgetting that the atmosphere also absorbs a significant portion of the EM spectrum.

The main goal of the JWST is to study exoplanets and the CMBR. Measurement of infrared light is essential to our understanding of both, and this is why the range of JWST is what it is.

Unfortunately money is finite. A 100 meter space telescope is beyond the budget and technology of NASA. Using naive scaling a single one would likely cost on the order of a 100 billion.

Yes, and that's why it wasn't built. It was risky and expensive. The 39 meter E-ELT will be a very good instrument however, exceeding JWST in many aspects at a fraction of the cost. A 100 meter ground based telescope however is not in principle a waste as you suggest however. It's pretty clear from the work on the E-ELT that AO for a 100 meter telescope was feasible and E-ELT will attempt to have a ultra high stability spectrograph and perhaps do the test of the expanding universe. In hindsight it was doable but probably not on ESOs budget.

>It's true that the atmosphere creates lower resolution and higher background, but you are forgetting that the atmosphere also absorbs a significant portion of the EM spectrum.
That's also true but there are wide transmission bands in the near infrared where JWST is optimised.

>The main goal of the JWST is to study exoplanets and the CMBR. Measurement of infrared light is essential to our understanding of both, and this is why the range of JWST is what it is.
No. JWST cannot detect the cosmic microwave background. It's primary purpose was to study the first galaxies. The CMB is at much longer wavelengths.

>that tiny cucked JWST in the corner

Kek wants his acolytes (us) to conquer the stars
Praise be upon him

Aren't space-based telescope better than anything ground-based?

These telescopes are all fucking worthless wastes of money that give us ZERO info

Why search for planets we are minimum 100+ years away from travelling to?

NASA is saved.

Yes they don't have the earths atmosphere fucking everything up and they can operate 24/7 whereas earth telescopes can only operate at night mainly.

Earth telescopes are also vulnerable to earthquakes and weather.

What stops it being smashed by micro meteorites?

Praise

Kek of course

>Hubble can see back nearly 14 billion years but it can't see further
>it's a complete waste of time building a telescope that can see further

No. As I explained here:
Many space telescopes like Hubble waste a great amount of time in overheads, that is preparing for observations and switching to the next target. In low Earth orbit most targets actually pass behind the Earth in the case of Hubble but it's much to slow to point to a new target so that time is just gone.

it would be a good thing, space 'exploration' is a massive waste of taxpayer funds for no tangible benefit (at least until we have FTL travel, which is clearly impossible). private enterprise should pursue this... not my tax money.

I would probably genuinely cry. Don't even joke about this.

I would definitely

SHADILAY

Kek favours Veeky Forums

Not on the pad anyway
youtube.com/watch?v=kYUrqdUyEpI

JWST won't see further, it'll see the same distance at higher res.

Wrong, the Hubble infrared optic is much worse than the JWST, so it will see further.

Hubble can see 13.4 billion light years away.
JWST will see a few hundred million light years further.

We can only see up to a hard limit less than 13.82 billion light years away because light coming from things further than that hasn't had time to reach us.

No. The Furthest sources seen by HST at about 31 billion light years distant, or redshift 10. The distance to a source is not just the light travel time multiplied by the speed of light, the universe is expanding.

It's hoped JWST may detect sources up to a redshift of 20 but unlike HST it will be limited just by it's sensitivity and not the lack of redder bands. This is only a difference of ~4 billion light years but it's a significant advance into the most rapid phase of galaxy formation. Importantly Hubble obtains virtually no information about these most distant sources, at best it gets a crude redshift and some idea of the rate at which it's forming stars. It's only measuring the far ultraviolet for these galaxies. JWST however will do imaging across a broad range of wavelengths including the rest frame optical and actually start to understand what these objects are, Hubble tells us little. It will also do spectroscopy of the brightest sources which will illuminate what is really going on.