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Nasa new telescope launch date11/11/2023 The team continues to be focused on reaching milestones and arriving at the technical solutions that will see us through to this new launch date next year.” “Webb is the world’s most complex space observatory, and our top science priority, and we’ve worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic. Webb is designed to last up to 10 years.“The perseverance and innovation of the entire Webb Telescope team has enabled us to work through challenging situations we could not have foreseen on our path to launch this unprecedented mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. It is then that NASA expects to release the initial batch of images captured by Webb. ![]() read moreĪstronomical operation of the telescope, to be managed from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, is expected to begin in the summer of 2022, following about six months of alignment and calibration of Webb's mirrors and instruments. Webb was developed at a cost of $8.8 billion, with operational expenses projected to bring its total price tag to about $9.66 billion, far higher than planned when NASA was previously aiming for a 2011 launch. "The world gave us this telescope, and we handed it back to the world today," Gregory Robinson, Webb program director for NASA told reporters at a post-launch briefing. The Arianespace launch vehicle is part of the European contribution. Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N) was the primary contractor. The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. Webb's instruments also make it ideal to search for evidence of potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented exoplanets - celestial bodies orbiting distant stars - and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn's icy moon Titan. While Hubble caught glimmers of "toddler" galaxies, Webb will reveal those objects in greater detail while also capturing even fainter, earlier "infant" galaxies, astrophysicist Eric Smith, NASA's Webb program scientist, told Reuters hours before the launch.Īside from examining the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies, astronomers are eager to study super-massive black holes believed to occupy the centers of distant galaxies. Hubble's view reached back to roughly 400 million years following the Big Bang, a period just after the very first galaxies - sprawling clusters of stars, gases and other interstellar matter - are believed to have taken shape. That, astronomers say, will bring into view a glimpse of the cosmos never previously seen - dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago. ![]() The new telescope's primary mirror - consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal - also has a much bigger light-collecting area, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back into time, than Hubble or any other telescope. ![]() ![]() Webb mainly will view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to peer through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born, while Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
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