The Hubble Space Telescope — hovering 360 miles above the earth’s surface — changed the world of astrophysics with detailed images of faint dots of light unhindered by clouds and atmospheric distortion.
Its successor will transmit images from 1 million miles away.
“We have to put it far away from the Earth in order to get it cold enough to do infrared work,” said John Mather, Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mission.
That also means there will be no repair missions for the Webb probe, he said. “We have to get it right the first time.”
The James Webb Space Telescope being constructed at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt is a large, infrared telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013 — the year Hubble is expected to end its career.
Webb will show astronomers the first galaxies forming in the early Universe, Mather said. They expect to see light coming from the first mega-stars formed within several hundred million years of the Big Bang — more than 13 billion light-years away.
Webb’s instruments will work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range, according to the NASA Web site.
Webb will also tout a larger mirror, 6.5 meters in diameter compared to Hubble’s 2.4 meter mirror, and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Both will fold up for launch and open once the telescope is in outer space.
Named for former NASA administrator James E. Webb, the man most commonly known for putting men on the moon, the telescope honors his commitment to furthering space science as well as manned missions.
Webb ran the fledgling space agency from February 1961 to October 1968, according to the NASA Web site.
