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Post by swamprat on Jun 28, 2018 19:03:37 GMT
I figured this was coming; sigh.....
NASA Delays Launch of James Webb Space Telescope Again — This Time to 2021
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | June 27, 2018
NASA has delayed the launch of its huge, highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope by another 10 months.
The liftoff of Webb, the successor to the agency's iconic Hubble Space Telescope, has been pushed back from May 2020 to March 2021, NASA officials announced today (June 27). The project's development cost has risen from $8 billion to $8.8 billion, and its total lifecycle price tag now stands at $9.66 billion, they added.
The rescheduling is the latest in a series of delays for Webb, which NASA had originally hoped to get off the ground way back in 2007.
"We have to get this right here on the ground before we go to space," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference today. "And I just want to re-emphasize: Webb is worth the wait."
Rocky road for a complex observatory
Webb is a multipurpose observatory that will allow astronomers to study some of the first stars and galaxies in the universe, hunt for possible signs of life in the atmospheres of nearby alien planets, and do a variety of other high-profile work. Its primary mirror is 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) wide, compared to 7.8 feet (2.4 m) for that of Hubble.
"Webb is vital to the next generation of research beyond NASA's Hubble Space Telescope," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. "It's going to do amazing things — things we've never been able to do before — as we peer into other galaxies and see light from the very dawn of time."
Webb is optimized to view the heavens in infrared light, and its instruments must therefore be kept quite cool. So the telescope will sport a giant sunshield the size of a tennis court, which will unfold after Webb reaches its final destination, a gravitationally stable spot about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.
The road to that destination has been quite bumpy to date. Webb is a very complex observatory that has proved difficult for primary contractor Northrop Grumman to build and test, as the repeated delays attest.
Until relatively recently, NASA had been targeting an October 2018 launch. In September of last year, however, NASA announced that spacecraft-integration issues had delayed the launch until spring 2019. Then, this past March, the agency pushed the scheduled liftoff date back again, to May 2020. More time was needed to test Webb's intricate systems and to deal with setbacks, such as small tears in the sunshield, NASA officials said at the time.
The agency also set up an independent review board (IRB) in March to monitor the observatory's progress and develop recommendations. The IRB submitted its report to NASA on May 31, and the agency wrapped up its response to that report yesterday (June 26). (You can read both the report and NASA's response here:)
www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/webb_irb_report_and_response_0.pdf
The IRB traced the 29-month delay (from a targeted launch date of October 2018 to March 2021) to five factors: human error, "embedded problems," excessive optimism, systems complexity, and a lack of experience in key areas, such as sunshade development.
IRB Chairman Tom Young laid out some of the most significant human errors during today's news conference. Technicians used the wrong solvent to clean propulsion valves; employed improper wiring that caused excessive voltage to be applied to transducers; and improperly installed sunshield-cover fasteners ahead of a key test, he said.
"All simple fixes that were not implemented resulted in approximately a 1.5-year schedule delay, at a cost of about $600 million," said Young, the former director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the former president and chief operating officer of aerospace company Martin Marietta (which merged with Lockheed Corporation in 1995, forming Lockheed Martin).
Going forward
The IRB report was key in NASA's latest plan for Webb, agency officials said. Indeed, the review panel made 32 separate recommendations for the observatory's development going forward, 30 of which NASA fully agrees with, Zurbuchen said. (The agency is still considering the other two, he added.)
Crucially, the IRB did not recommend pulling the plug on the telescope.
"With all the factors that I've discussed considered, the IRB believes that JWST should continue, because of the compelling science, and because of JWST's national importance," Young said.
The bump in the mission's development cost from $8 billion to $8.8 billion may complicate that vision, however. The former number was a cap imposed by Congress, meaning that Webb needs another signoff from Capitol Hill to proceed.
"We submit our final 'breach report' to Congress this week," NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk said during today's news conference. "And then, it is true that Congress will have to reauthorize Webb through this next cycle of appropriations."
www.space.com/41016-nasa-delays-james-webb-space-telescope-2021.html
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Post by swamprat on Jul 30, 2018 15:19:55 GMT
Still on shaky ground; sigh... (This has been going on since 2012.) Northrop CEO Offers to Link JWST Profit to Mission Success
By Jeff Foust, SpaceNews Writer | July 26, 2018
James Webb Space Telescope | Artist's impression
WASHINGTON — The chief executive of Northrop Grumman said July 26 he is willing to make the profit his company earns on the James Webb Space Telescope contingent on the overall success of the mission.
In the second half of a two-part hearing by the House Science Committee on the mission's latest overruns, Wes Bush endorsed an idea discussed by the committee a day earlier to put all the award fees due to the company on its cost-plus contract into an account to be released only after the spacecraft is successfully commissioned in space after launch.
"As a mechanism to ensure we are all aligned on mission success, Northrop Grumman has actually discussed this with NASA, and we are willing to place all of the fee that we've already earned and the fee that we may earn in the future at risk based on successful activation and demonstration of the telescope on orbit," he said when asked about the proposal by the committee's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas).
Smith pressed for more. "Would you agree to pay the 800 [million dollars] above capped costs?" he asked, a reference to the recent overrun above the mission's $8 billion cost cap.
Bush declined. "Our view on that is that would create more of a fixed-price relationship on this program, which would significantly impede and impair the relationship between NASA and Northrop Grumman," he responded. "As we are focused on mission success, we think that would be the wrong approach."
Smith said he was disappointed. "I only wish that Northrop Grumman was willing to take responsibility and show a little bit more good faith," he said. "But it sounds like you've made up your mind. I just happen to disagree with you."
At the end of the hearing, Smith again questioned Bush on issues such as the financial impact the cost overruns have had on Northrop and whether any employees responsible for human errors that led to delays had lost the jobs.
"With respect to the mistakes we're talking about here today, I do not recall any losing their jobs," Bush said.
Smith grew frustrated when Bush repeatedly declined to state the company's profit last year, offering instead to provide that information for the record to ensure its accuracy. "How could a CEO not know what the profit of his company was last year?" Smith asked.
Northrop Grumman reported net earnings of just over $2 billion in 2017, according to the company’s 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2018.
Smith's questioning, though, was largely the exception to the rule in the hearing. Other members seemed less interested in assigning blame than seeking assurances that the problems that caused the latest overrun have been corrected.
"I'm not here to berate Northrop Grumman and its associated subcontractors, but rather see what needs to be done to keep this from happening again," said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), ranking member of the committee, in her opening statement.
"I want to take issue with, I think, overstated allegations of poor management," said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). "We make the best decisions we can on a minute-by-minute basis, with the best advice we have, and sometimes we're still going to get it wrong."
Bush said the company was taking steps to minimize the possibility of future problems, including a "safety net" to catch human errors early enough to limit their impact. "We're never going to be able to get human errors to zero. The word 'human' in that equation tells you that," he said.
"I feel very, very good about where we are in that regard," he said of those efforts to limit errors, adding the company has accepted and was implementing the recommendations of an independent review board (IRB) that released its final report a month ago.
Tom Young, the chairman of that board, argued at the hearing that NASA should reconvene the board in the near future — perhaps in the latter half of September — to check that the recommendations are being implemented. "Our belief is that it should be done. The IRB is willing to do that, and we personally think that it needs to be done early enough in the process that it can have an impact and late enough where things have been done," he said.
While most members appeared satisfied with Northrop Grumman's efforts to address the JWST overrun, and highlighted the science and inspirational benefits, one congressman was not moved.
"I cannot join you in this uplifting testimony," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) Whoever was responsible for JWST at the company, he told Bush, "failed us and failed the American people."
www.space.com/41300-northrop-ceo-link-jwst-profit-mission-success.html
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Post by swamprat on Mar 28, 2019 2:34:32 GMT
This telescope is STILL not out of trouble!Space News
JWST review board raises schedule concerns
by Jeff Foust — March 27, 2019
The chairman of the independent review board that examined progress on the James Webb Space Telescope said March 26 the mission appears to be consuming "significantly higher" schedule reserve as expected as it goes through integration and testing work. Credit: NASA/Desiree Stover
WASHINGTON — As NASA commits to performing another cost and schedule estimate for the James Webb Space Telescope, the chairman of an independent review board said he’s concerned about its ability to remain on track for a launch in two years.
Speaking at a meeting of the Committee of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the National Academies’ Space Science Week event here March 26, Tom Young, who chaired the Independent Review Board chartered by NASA last year to review cost and schedule problems with JWST, said that since the agency revised the schedule of the mission last June work on the space telescope appeared be taking longer than expected.
While the board completed its assessment last June, NASA brought the board back last fall to assess how NASA implemented its recommendations. Its final report on that assessment was released by NASA March 1.
“We went back and took a look at schedule performance as a part of our assessment,” he said. “One thing really did catch our attention and that was, in our judgement, that the consumption of margin at the time we looked at that was significantly higher than we would have expected.”
Young said the board didn’t do a formal analysis of the current target launch date of end of March 2021 but rather “some back-of-the-envelope looks” at the schedule for the remaining two years before launch. “It suggested to us there was cause for concern,” he said. “Reserved had been consumed at a pretty high rate and the impact of that should really be better understood and analyzed.”
Earlier in the meeting, Greg Robinson, JWST program director at NASA, played down schedule concerns. “We’re doing pretty good with these milestones,” he said of progress on the telescope, “and that means we have good margin in the schedule.” That includes, he said, 60 days of margin for integration and testing of the combined spacecraft bus and optical elements, three weeks after the observatory arrives at the launch site and four months of reserve held at NASA Headquarters.
However, he acknowledged that the program consumed the more than two months of schedule reserve that had been set aside for integration and testing of the spacecraft element at Northrop Grumman’s facilities. That margin was used up during vibration testing, he said, although he emphasized those tests concluded successfully. “Mission success is our number one aim,” he said. Thermal vacuum testing of the spacecraft is expected to begin this week, he added.
Robinson said JWST’s standing review board will meet April 2 and 3 to discuss the status of the mission. “One of the things they’re going to pay a lot of attention to is the schedule: how we’re doing on the schedule, what are the risks against it, et cetera,” he said.
The same day as the committee meeting, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a new report on JWST, the latest in a regular series by the agency tracking the progress of the telescope’s development. It also raised schedule concerns, noting that, as of last November, the mission “is about a week behind its replanned schedule because repairs on the membrane cover assembly took longer than planned.”
The GAO report recommended that NASA performed a detailed review of the mission’s cost and schedule, called joint confidence level (JCL), to be completed no later than the system integration review scheduled for August. NASA had previously declined to do a JCL because, at this phase of the mission’s development, it concluded it could more easily estimate costs and risks based on remaining work.
The GAO disagreed. “Conducting a JCL at system integration review — a review that occurs during the riskiest phase of development, the integration and test phase — would allow the project to update its assumptions of risk and uncertainty based on its experiences” testing the separate spacecraft bus and optical elements prior to integrating those two elements into a single spacecraft.
In a response included in the report, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, accepted the report’s sole recommendation to perform a JCL. That review, he said, will be completed prior to the system integrated review.
The independent review board chaired by Young came up with 32 recommendations. He said that, in the board’s later assessment, NASA was doing a good job implementing them. Of the 32, the board found that NASA had done an “appropriate” or “appropriate with additional work needed” job implementing 29 of them, ratings he likened to letter grades of A or A–.
For the other three, NASA’s response was inadequate, he said. Two of the three dealt with the reporting structure for the mission, which does not make the director of the Goddard Space Flight Center, the lead center for JWST, responsible for all aspects of the project. The board had recommended the Goddard director be given that responsibility and warned that otherwise it “will significantly reduce the probability of JWST success including cost, schedule and in-flight performance.”
A third recommendation deemed inadequate dealt with giving NASA’s Launch Services Program the same responsibility for the launch of JWST on an ESA-provided Ariane 5 as it has for launches on American vehicles. While NASA has increased its oversight of the mission, that work has fallen short of the recommendation, Young said.
That recommendation, he added, did not reflect any concerns with the Ariane 5 itself. “It has an impressive success record comparable to U.S. launch vehicles in the same class,” he said. “But there are impediments to having full visibility as would take place with U.S. launch vehicles.”
spacenews.com/jwst-review-board-raises-schedule-concerns/
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Post by swamprat on Jun 5, 2019 19:08:24 GMT
Sigh..... Progress in technology takes a lot of money and a lot of time.....James Webb Space Telescope, SLS Megarocket Drive Up Cost and Schedule Growth on NASA Programs
By Jeff Foust | Spaceflight
June 5, 2019
The spacecraft element of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope being prepared for thermal vacuum testing. Problems with the spacecraft played a major factor in overall cost and schedule growth for major NASA programs. (Image: © Northrop Grumman)
WASHINGTON — NASA is suffering growing problems with cost and schedule on its major programs, driven by continued issues with two of its highest profile efforts.
In its annual "Assessments of Major Projects" report issued May 30, the Government Accountability Office found that average cost growth and schedule delay for large NASA programs grew in 2018, with the expectation of further growth.
"The cost and schedule performance of NASA's portfolio of major projects continues to deteriorate," the report bluntly concluded. The average schedule delay for NASA programs grew in 2018 to 13 months, the highest recorded by the GAO since it started its annual survey of NASA programs a decade ago. Cost growth rose to 27.6 percent, the highest since 2014.
The biggest factor in the increase is the James Webb Space Telescope. Last year NASA delayed the launch of the mission to March 2021 and said its cost would increase by about $800 million because of several problems during integration and testing of the observatory's spacecraft element. Since its 2009 baseline, JWST's total cost estimate has grown by 95 percent, from just under $5 billion to nearly $9.7 billion, while its launch has been delayed by nearly seven years.
A secondary factor is the Space Launch System, which has suffered problems with the assembly of its core stage. "Boeing underestimated both the complexity of engine section assembly and the time and manpower that would be needed to complete the effort, which has contributed to cost growth," the report noted, referring to the prime contractor for the core stage.
Those problems have increased the cost of SLS by 10 percent from its 2014 baseline, to $10.7 billion, and delayed its launch by at least 19 months to June 2020. That date is likely to slip further, agency officials have acknowledged, as they seek to keep the launch from slipping into 2021. The GAO noted that the June 2020 launch date had "6 to 12 months of risk."
Several other programs also experienced cost increases in the latest report, including Orion, Mars 2020 and the Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment, an ongoing project to upgrade ground stations used by NASA missions. NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, mission, also suffered a delay due to issues with its Pegasus XL rocket, and not with the spacecraft itself.
The GAO report warned of continued potential for cost and schedule growth. Besides the schedule risk with SLS, the reported warned that more delays are possible with JWST as it begins final integration and testing of the spacecraft this fall, when the spacecraft element is joined to the mirror and instruments. "Our prior work has shown that integration and testing is the phase in which problems are most likely to be found and schedules tend to slip," the report stated.
In recent weeks NASA and its contractors have emphasized that, despite past problems, both JWST and SLS are going well now. JWST project officials at NASA and prime contractor Northrop Grumman said at a town hall meeting in April that they remained on schedule despite concerns expressed by independent reviewers that the mission was consuming schedule reserve at a high rate. Northrop announced May 30 that the spacecraft element of JWST successfully completed its final thermal vacuum test.
At a May 28 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's human exploration and operations committee, Bill Hill, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, said he thought work on the SLS core stage was back on track after a number of changes, including a shift from vertical to horizontal integration of the components of the stage.
"The team at [Michoud Assembly Facility] is doing amazing work," he said. "In the last few months, Boeing has hit their schedule predictions and hit their marks, and that's encouraging."
While programs like JWST and SLS have driven up average cost and schedule growth, other, smaller, programs have done better. Several such missions reported no cost growth or schedule delays. The Parker Solar Probe, which launched on schedule last August, came in $40.5 million under budget.
www.space.com/jwst-sls-increase-cost-nasa-programs.html
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Post by swamprat on Aug 28, 2019 20:20:36 GMT
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Is Finally 100% Assembled
By Mike Wall 2 hours ago Science & Astronomy
The milestone was a long time coming.
The fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope with its sunshield and “unitized pallet structures” (which fold up around the telescope for launch) are seen partially deployed to an open configuration to enable telescope installation. (Image: © NASA/Chris Gunn)
NASA's next big space observatory has finally come together.
Engineers have joined both halves of the $9.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in March 2021, NASA officials announced today (Aug. 28).
"The assembly of the telescope and its scientific instruments, sunshield and the spacecraft into one observatory represents an incredible achievement by the entire Webb team," Webb project manager Bill Ochs, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.
"This milestone symbolizes the efforts of thousands of dedicated individuals for over more than 20 years across NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, Northrop Grumman and the rest of our industrial and academic partners," Ochs added.
The recent work took place at the Redondo Beach, California, facilities of Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for Webb, which NASA bills as the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope.
Using a crane, engineers gently lowered the telescope element, which consists of the optical and scientific gear, onto the spacecraft body. Webb's complex, foldable sunshield, which will keep the telescope's instruments cool during operation, was already connected to the spacecraft segment.
The team then connected the two halves mechanically. Technicians still need to make, and then test, the electrical connections between the pieces, NASA officials said.
The assembly milestone was a long time coming; the Webb Space Telescope mission has endured a series of delays and cost overruns. Since 2009, for example, the project's price tag has almost doubled, and its target launch date has been pushed back by nearly seven years.
But the telescope's great scientific potential makes all that hard work and struggle worthwhile, NASA officials have said. The powerful Webb, which is optimized to view the universe in infrared light, will allow astronomers to address some of the biggest cosmic questions once it's up and running at the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable point in space about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.
Researchers will use the observatory to hunt for signs of life in the atmospheres of nearby alien planets, for example, and to study the formation of the universe's first stars and galaxies about 13.5 billion years ago.
Three-quarter view of the top
Bottom (sun-facing side)
"This is an exciting time to now see all Webb's parts finally joined together into a single observatory for the very first time," Gregory Robinson, the Webb program director at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in the same statement. "The engineering team has accomplished a huge step forward, and soon we will be able to see incredible new views of our amazing universe."
www.space.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-complete.html
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Post by swamprat on Sept 2, 2019 14:21:17 GMT
Will the Webb telescope be able to detect life signs at nearby exoplanets?
Posted by Paul Scott Anderson in SPACE | September 2, 2019
The Webb Telescope is Hubble’s successor, due to launch in 2021. A new study says it’ll be powerful enough to search for life signatures in the atmospheres of the 7 Earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, just 39 light-years away.
Artist’s concept of the James Webb Space Telescope as it’ll appear once it’s launched to Earth-orbit in 2021. Image via Northrop Grumman/JWST.
Only 39 light-years from Earth – right next door, cosmically-speaking – there’s a solar system with seven Earth-sized rocky planets. The system is called TRAPPIST-1. All of its seven planets are intriguing, and three of them orbit in their star’s habitable zone, where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist on them.
These worlds have been the subject of much study in the past few years, but there are limits to what current telescopes can learn more about them. What’s more, there’s been a debate about whether the James Webb Space Telescope – Hubble’s successor, scheduled for launch in March of 2021 – will be powerful enough to detect life signs at the distance of these Earth-sized planets, if indeed life signs do exist there. But now a new study says, yes, the Webb will be able to analyze their atmospheres for biosignatures. What’s more, the study says, this analysis could be done in only a year, although clouds in the planets’ atmospheres might pose a problem.
The new paper was first published on June 21, 2019 in The Astronomical Journal, and the study was led by Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, an astronomy student at the University of Washington.
earthsky.org/space/james-webb-space-telescope-study-atmospheres-trappist-1-exoplanets
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Post by swamprat on Oct 29, 2019 21:05:54 GMT
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Passes Vital Sun Shield Test
By Samantha Mathewson | Oct. 29 | Spaceflight
NASA tested the deployment and tension of the five-layer sun shield, which will protect the James Webb Space Telescope once it is in orbit. (Image: © Chris Gunn/NASA)
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has reached a major milestone with a successful test of the spacecraft's sun shield.
Engineers fully deployed and tensioned each of the five layers of the sun shield, which will protect the telescope from the sun's powerful radiation and, in turn, help regulate the temperature of Webb's optics and sensors. As part of the test, the sun shield was extended to the same position it will be in when it is 1 million miles from Earth, according to a statement from NASA.
"This was the first time that the sun shield has been deployed and tensioned by the spacecraft electronics and with the telescope present above it," James Cooper, NASA's Webb Telescope sun shield manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement. "The deployment is visually stunning as a result, and it was challenging to accomplish."
The James Webb telescope is expected to launch in March 2021. The tennis court-size sun shield consists of five layers that are each coated in a vapor-deposited aluminum substance to reflect the sun's heat into space, according to the statement.
Testing the sun shield's deployment helps ensure that it will function successfully once in orbit. In order to simulate the lack of gravity that the spacecraft will experience, NASA technicians used gravity-offsetting pulleys and weights.
"This test showed that the sunshield system survived spacecraft element environmental testing, and taught us about the interfaces and interactions between the telescope and sunshield parts of the observatory," Cooper said in the statement. "Many thanks to all the engineers and technicians for their perseverance, focus and countless hours of effort to achieve this milestone."
When deployed, the sun shield separates the space observatory into a warm side that always faces the sun and a cold side that always faces deep space. Following the successful deployment, NASA team members will start folding the sun shield back into its stowed position, according to the statement.
Next, the spacecraft will undergo electrical and mechanical tests to simulate the vibration environment it will endure during launch. Then, the telescope has just one final deployment and stowing cycle before it launches to space.
www.space.com/jwst-clears-sunshield-deployment-testing.html
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2019 0:55:44 GMT
To bad the space shuttle is gone.
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Post by swamprat on Jan 6, 2020 16:46:39 GMT
James Webb Space Telescope on Track for March 2021 Launch, NASA Says
By Meghan Bartels | January 6, 2020
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope was fully assembled for the first time in August 2019. (Image: © NASA/Chris Gunn)
HONOLULU — NASA's next flagship space telescope is still on track for a launch in March 2021 despite long-standing scheduling concerns, according to agency personnel.
The James Webb Space Telescope has been notoriously prone to delays and cost overruns, but during two town hall meetings held here at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting, NASA leaders emphasized that the launch date set in June 2018 still holds. A second major telescope is also continuing to meet its timeline, targeting a launch in the mid-2020s.
"This past year was an exciting year for James Webb," Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said of Webb on Sunday (Jan. 5) during an update about the astrophysics program. "This is your next great observatory."
But before it can become NASA's next great observatory, Webb needs to complete a host of milestones this year. Right now, the spacecraft is being packed up from the first test of its deployment. Next, engineers will subject the spacecraft to the type of vibration and acoustic environments it will experience during launch on an Ariane 5 rocket.
Then, the mission team will test deploying it again to ensure that those environmental tests didn't create any new problems. A host of other, smaller tasks are also scheduled for this year, according to NASA's Eric Smith at a separate town hall dedicated exclusively to Webb, which is currently estimated to cost about $9.7 billion. One vital step will be replacing some electronics that failed during an earlier test, which Smith said is the type of work that has never been done on the telescope before.
Smith emphasized both that the bulk of the work on Webb is complete and that the activities scheduled for the next 15 months are crucial to the mission's success.
"We're just about done constructing the observatory; pretty soon it's our job here to realize the promise of that," Smith said. "We have the James Webb Space Telescope now. What we have to do is make sure it works as planned."
It's not just Webb that will spend the year preparing for launch — the project's humans will as well, according to mission operations project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland Jane Rigby. The team conducted nine rehearsals in 2019 of various phases of the mission, from launch through deployment and a six-month commissioning phase and into gathering science data; Webb staff will complete another 14 such rehearsals this year.
Webb isn't the only major telescope that NASA's astrophysics team is building this year; the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, is also a key focus of the division's resources, Hertz said.
"We are at peak spending on WFIRST right now so we are at the point in the program where we are getting the most done every year as we make progress toward launch in the 2020s," Hertz said. At one point during his presentation, he pointed to a slide of tasks for the year. "You can read this: We're building stuff," he said.
That work is supported by the NASA budget that Congress approved last month, which fully funds both Webb and WFIRST, despite President Donald Trump administration's proposal to cancel the latter program. The December approval of a budget marks a break from recent years characterized by drawn-out negotiations that have left agencies in the dark about the funding they would receive.
"I'm not sure how many years it's been since the last time I could stand in front of you and say, 'I have received my appropriation for the current fiscal year,'" Hertz said. "Those of us who work for the federal government are ecstatic. … It's really good news."
www.space.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-astrophysics-plans-2020.html
Note: For more photos of the James Webb being built, go here: www.space.com/17142-james-webb-space-telescope-photos.html
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Post by swamprat on Jul 17, 2020 0:52:38 GMT
NASA delays launch of flagship James Webb Space Telescope to Oct. 31, 2021By Mike Wall 2 hours ago
It's a seven-month delay due in part to COVID-19.
The launch of NASA's next flagship space telescope has been pushed back another seven months.
The liftoff of the $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed from March 2021 until Oct. 31 of that year, NASA officials announced today (July 16), citing technical difficulties as well as complications imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
"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," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "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."
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in the clean room at Northrop Grumman, Redondo Beach, California, in July 2020. It's launch is now scheduled for Oct. 31, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/Chris Gunn)
Today's news didn't exactly come out of left field. Zurbuchen said last month that Webb would not meet the March 2021 deadline and that a new target date would be determined soon. And the highly anticipated Webb has suffered a series of cost overruns and schedule slips over the past decade. Since 2009, the mission's estimated cost has nearly doubled, and its launch date has been pushed back by about seven years.
NASA officials attributed three months of this latest seven-month delay to the coronavirus pandemic, which forced many NASA centers to impose mandatory work-from-home orders. "Risk reduction" work on complex Webb tech, such as the observatory's huge, foldable sunshield, added two more months. The remaining two months were added for "schedule margin," giving the mission some breathing room on its long road to the launch pad.
But the schedule slip won't increase the 13,670-lb. (6,200 kilograms) Webb's hefty price tag, mission team members said.
“Based on current projections, the program expects to complete the remaining work within the new schedule without requiring additional funds," Gregory Robinson, NASA Webb program director at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in the same statement.
Webb has been fully assembled, and the observatory is currently undergoing a series of tests at the Redondo Beach, California, facilities of Northrop Grumman, the mission's prime contractor. When that extensive work is done, the spacecraft will be shipped to its launch site, Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America.
Webb will launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket, then head to the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable point in space about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. The observatory will deploy its sunshield, which is about the size of a tennis court and will help keep Webb's instruments cool.
That cooling is vital to the telescope's mission, which involves studying the universe in infrared light. This work will be varied and revelatory, NASA officials have said.
"Webb is designed to build upon the incredible legacies of [NASA's] Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, by observing the infrared universe and exploring every phase of cosmic history," Eric Smith, Webb's program scientist at NASA headquarters, said in the same statement. "The observatory will detect light from the first generation of galaxies that formed in the early universe after the Big Bang and study the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets for possible signs of habitability."
And perhaps more exciting are the discoveries that researchers cannot predict before the telescope gets up and running.
"What I want to see the most out of Webb is that which I can't anticipate today," Smith said during a news conference today. "When somebody, some young scientist out there, comes up with a novel way to use this, completely unexpected — that's when these facilities really blow us away. I'm waiting for that."
www.space.com/nasa-delays-james-webb-space-telescope-october-2021.html
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Post by swamprat on Jan 31, 2021 16:46:43 GMT
JADES will go deeper than the Hubble Deep Fields
Posted by Theresa Wiegert in SPACE | January 31, 2021
Astronomers announced this month that a new deep-field survey called JADES will be carried out with the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s much-anticipated successor. The Webb is due to launch later this year.
Astronomers announced a new deeper-than-ever sky survey this month (January 15, 2021), to be conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble telescope’s successor, scheduled for launch in October of this year. The new survey is abbreviated JADES, which is short for James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. The survey will be like the Hubble Deep Fields, but deeper still. Its main goal is to see far away in space – and thus far back into the very young universe – and image it just at the end of the so-called Cosmic Dark Ages, that is, at the time when gas in the universe went from being opaque to transparent. This is also the time when the very first stars were forming – very large, massive and bright stars – in a veritable firestorm of star birth when the young universe was less than 5% of its current age.
The Webb telescope will be located near the secnd Lagrange point – a relatively stable region of space, gravitationally speaking, known as L2 – some 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth. To conduct the new survey, the Webb will be staring at a small point of space for nearly 800 hours (approximately 33 days) to be able to see fainter objects than those ever seen before and thus to find the first generation of galaxies. Astronomers want to know, among other things, how fast did these galaxies form, and how fast did their stars form? They also want to look for the very first supermassive black holes, which are thought to lie at the hearts of nearly all large galaxies, including our Milky Way.
The long-anticipated launch of the Webb has been postponed a number of times for a variety of reasons, most recently because of effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the formal successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, but is equipped with instrumentation able to image further into the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum than Hubble did.
This capability also makes it a worthy successor to the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope which recently went into retirement.
What makes the infrared part of the spectrum so important for surveys like JADES? If you look really deep, you will also look back in time, and the farther back in time you look, the more redshifted the galaxies are (the farther away they are, the faster they move away from us, and the more their light has been shifted towards the red part of the spectrum). This means that the light we want to observe, originally in the optical (visible) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, might not even show much in the optical part anymore. Instead, it’s been shifted to longer wavelengths, into the infrared regime.
In other words, the use of infrared cameras is necessary to be able to see the light from the first generation of galaxies. Daniel Eisenstein, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said:
"Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years. We’re trying to investigate those early periods. We must do this with an infrared-optimized telescope because the expansion of the universe causes light to increase in wavelength as it traverses the vast distance to reach us. So even though the stars are emitting light primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, that light is shifted quite relentlessly out into the infrared. Only Webb can get to the depth and sensitivity that’s needed to study these early galaxies."
In fact, the James Webb Space Telescope was built specifically for this purpose. Up to now, infrared images are much less resolved – less clear – than optical images, because of their longer wavelength. With its much larger collecting area, the Webb will be able to image, in infrared, at the same resolution – detail – that Hubble could obtain in the optical part of the spectrum.
Get ready for a whole new set of mind-blowing images of the universe, this time in the infrared, from Webb!
After having successfully deployed its solar panels – precisely as it’s supposed to do once it’s in space – the Webb telescope is shown here ready for the final tests on December 17, 2020, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Then it will be packed up and transported to French Guyana, to be launched on October 31, 2021, via an Ariane V rocket. Image via NASA/ Chris Gunn.
The use of deep field surveys is a young science, for two reasons. First, astronomers didn’t have the right instrumentation before Hubble to do them. Second, it’s also because no one initially knew the result of staring into a piece of empty space for a long time. Such a long stare into the unknown would require valuable observation time, and if this long observation didn’t produce any results, it would be considered a waste.
But in 1995, Robert Williams, then the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci), which administrates the Hubble telescope, decided to use his “director’s discretionary time” to point the Hubble toward a very small and absolutely empty-looking part of the sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major the Great Bear. There were no stars visible from our Milky Way (or extremely few), no nearby galaxies visible in the field, and no visible gas clouds. Hubble collected photons for 10 consecutive days, and the result, the Hubble Deep Field, was a success and a paradigm changer: A patch of sky about as small as the eye of George Washington on an American quarter (25-cent coin) held out at arm’s length, showed a 10 billion-light-years-long tunnel back in time with a plethora of galaxies – around 3,000 of them – at different evolutionary stages along the way. The field of observational cosmology was born.
This was done again in 1998 with the Hubble telescope pointed to the southern sky (Hubble Deep Field South), and the result was the same. Thus we learned that the universe is uniform over large scales.
Next was the installation of a new, powerful camera on Hubble (the Advanced Camera for Surveys) in 2002. The incredible Hubble Ultra Deep Field was acquired in 2004, in a similarly small patch of sky near the constellation Orion, about 1/10 of a full moon diameter (2.4 x 3.4 arc minutes, in contrast to the original Hubble Deep Fields north and south, which were 2.6 x 2.6 arc minutes). And so our reach was extended even deeper into space, and even further back in time, showing light from 10 thousand galaxies along a 13-billion-light-years-long tunnel of space. If you’ll remember that the universe is about 13.77 billion years old, you’ll see this is getting us really close to the beginning!
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was the most sensitive astronomical image ever made at wavelengths of visible (optical) light until 2012, when an even more refined version was released, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, which reached even farther: 13.2 billion years back in time.
The JADES survey will be observed in two batches, one on the northern sky and one on the southern in two famous fields called GOODS North and South (abbreviated from Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey).
Marcia Rieke, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona who co-leads the JADES Team with Pierre Ferruit of the European Space Agency (ESA), explained:
"We chose these fields because they have such a great wealth of supporting information. They’ve been studied at many other wavelengths, so they were the logical ones to do."
The GOODS fields have been observed with several of the most famous telescopes, covering a great wavelength range from infrared through optical to X-ray. They are not fully as deep (the observations don’t reach as far back) as the Ultra Deep Field, but cover a larger area of the sky (4-5 times larger) and are the most data-rich areas of the sky in terms of depth combined with wavelength coverage. By the way, the first deep field, HDF-N, is located in the GOODS north image, and the Ultra deep field/eXtreme (don’t you love these names?) is located in the GOODS south field.
There are a large number of ambitious science goals for the JADES program pertaining to the composition of the first galaxies, including the first generation of supermassive black holes. How these came about at such an early time is a mystery. As well, the transition of gas from neutral and opaque to transparent and ionized, something astronomers call the epoch of reionization, is not well understood. JADES team member Andrew Bunker, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who is also part of the ESA team behind the Webb telescope, said:
"This transition is a fundamental phase change in the nature of the universe. We want to understand what caused it. It could be that it’s the light from very early galaxies and the first burst of star formation … It is kind of one of the Holy Grails, to find the so-called Population III stars that formed from the hydrogen and helium of the Big Bang.
People have been trying to do this for many decades and results have been inconclusive so far."
But, hopefully, not for much longer!
Bottom line: JADES is an ambitious new deep sky survey to be observed with the James Webb Space Telescope, once launched. It will reach further back in time and space than any survey before, to study the very first generation of galaxies after the universe transitioned from opaque to transparent.
SOURCE: Space
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Post by swamprat on Mar 5, 2021 18:25:16 GMT
On track to launch in October 2021: the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA said that Webb cleared more key tests the observatory must pass before heading to the launch pad. Next up: technicians will fold Webb’s sunshield and deploy its mirror for the final time. Learn more about the mission: James Webb Space Telescope, the World's Next… | The Planetary Society
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Post by swamprat on Apr 21, 2021 0:34:12 GMT
When will the James Webb Telescope enter solar orbit, and how far will it be able to 'see'?
Michael Schneider
If no more problems are found, it will be probably launch in 2021.This telescope is the pinnacle of technology, and the most risky, expensive, biggest and complex space telescope ever built. To give an idea of its size:
If and it is a big if everything goes well and JWST reaches L2, it will be able to see up to 13.5 billion years into the past.Many people will hold their breath when JWST launches, there are so many things that can go wrong.
We will see the first stars form, the first planets and galaxies, it will tell us more about the origins of life. This telescope will look at the beginning of the universe, right after the dark age, when there was no light.
There are 10 brand new technologies on JWST. The NIRSpec Instrument is very special, it is a multi object spectograph and has a array of 62,000 microshutters. Each individual microshutter is about 100 by 200 microns in dimension and allows the instrument to do spectroscopy on many different selected objects simultaneously (max 100 targets at the same time).With this technology it is possible to find and measure exoplanets and stars at an unprecedented rate.
What it took a day to observe with the Kepler telescope, the JSWT will need a half hour. JWST is so powerful it could see a bumble bee on the moon from a million miles away. is 100 times more sensitive in infrared then the Hubble telescope. If you would look through the JWST from a planet 21 light years away, you would still be able to see the earth.
(25) Michael Schneider's answer to When will the James Webb Telescope enter solar orbit, and how far will it be able to 'see'? - Quora
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Post by swamprat on Jun 2, 2021 2:43:26 GMT
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Post by Cliff on Aug 26, 2021 16:37:57 GMT
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