The $11B Webb telescope aims to probe the early universe

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03620-1

by infodocket • 5 years ago

353 267 5 years ago

nature.com

chasil• 5 years ago

Quick! Take it back to the lab and put one of these on it!

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/colour-changing-magnifyi...

malfist• 5 years ago

I now you're probably being factious, but the mirror on the telescope is already specifically designed for seeing long wavelength to near infrared spectrum.

chana_masala• 5 years ago

$11B is actually not very much for what this is. Good deal!

credit_guy5• 5 years ago

Why is that? If the pricetag was, for example $25 BN, would you say that would have been too expensive? Where do you draw the line? Or no price is too high for this telescope?

pradn• 5 years ago

When US gov expenditures are like $4 trillion yearly, $11 billion for an era-defining, cutting-edge space telescope built over 10-15 years does not seem much at all.

whatroot8• 5 years ago

Money is a completely abstract thing and at this point says nothing about the material economics. It’s used to manage agency.

Essentially we allowed people $11 billion in human agency to occur for scientific reasons.

Sorry we didn’t put more of it into cars and video games, but your economy surely benefited from people doing the real economic exchange this required.

Personally I’d love to put it into designer drugs we can use to let me hallucinate a reality where miserly bean countering control freaks don’t exist, since we’re all going to die anyway and entropy will erode the universe.

Excepting rules against violence and careless end of the species, why all the rules?

bumby6• 5 years ago

I think the JWST is managed as part of NASA's Space Science Directorate. That directorate gets a little less than $8B of the agency's roughly $23B budget. You'd have to look at the breakdown by year, but 10-15% of the annual directorate budget is substantial but not absurd given the project.

panick21_9• 5 years ago

The problem is not the price as such but contractors promising something for $2.5B and then spending 4x time and 4x the amount of cost without suffering any negative consequences. For Northrop this has been nothing but nice, basically finance its space division for decades.

We need a space industry that delivers on target and reward those contractors.

The growth in cost of Webb, directly detracts from other missions. It also has to be compared to actually building 4 actual $2.5B telescopes. There is lots of evidence that faster iteration, more missions give more overall science.

Continuously launching and continuously improving would be far better plan. Webb has lots of subsystems that have been done base on 10-20 year old engineering. But because of the approach one iteration cycle for some of these technologies takes 30 years.

gadnuk9• 5 years ago

The deployment sequence that takes approx 30 days is terrifying but also probably one of the most complex things we would ever achieve if successful.

Have been waiting for this since I was a teenager. Can't believe we are almost there (launch on Dec 22).

Here's a short 2 min video of that deployment sequence if anyone wants to be fascinated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzGLKQ7_KZQ

Also a short interview with Dr. John Mather (could listen to him all day) if anyone wants to know how the telescope works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P8fKd0IVOs

ashika• 5 years ago

it's wild to me, given all the delays and complexity and risk, that the mission length is only 5-10 years max. but even if it blows up on the launchpad we've learned a ton, if only about the difficulty of manufacturing such devices in the 21st century. i am praying it does work, though, and that we get 10 years of amazing data from it before eagerly deploying a replacement.

cogman105• 5 years ago

Is 10 years a hard max (like does it crash into the moon or something?) or is it just a projected max timeframe?

I wonder that mostly because we've managed to use a lot of our other space equipment well past their their mission lengths. I'd be interested if JWST is possibly the same.

ainar-g• 5 years ago

The Opportunity rover had a planned mission duration of ~93 Earth days. It went on to serve for ~5,500.

sophacles2• 5 years ago

Cool videos thanks. Do you have any handy links to why it takes 30 days to unfold everything? I assume there are good reasons, but I just can't imagine what they are.

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

I think there is a lot of testing done after each step. It also may have to do with the cooling.

smarx0072• 5 years ago

I think most critical phases you’d want to happen when the satellite is in direct contact with the ground stations (they probably make extensive use of relay satellites to maximize windows of telemetry/payload data transmission, but here we are talking about issuing critical command sequences). Those windows are not 8 hours long. Further, it apparently takes almost 30 days to travel to the L2 Lagrange point and not all systems deploy until then.

Edit: nope, I was wrong, it’s going to deploy a whole range of systems while on the way to the L2. https://youtu.be/RzGLKQ7_KZQ

gadnuk9• 5 years ago

Here's another video expanding a bit more on that deployment sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY9KckPI68Y

The observatory has around 7000 moving parts with complex structures for the primary and secondary mirrors and more importantly, the sunshield that would be used to keep the observatory instruments at a specific low temperature. It will take roughly 30 days for Webb to reach the start of its orbit at L2.

At the end of 30 days, the telescope should have stabilized itself in an orbit around L2. But I would assume it takes that many days for deployment and unfolding everything because of the sheer number of parts and motions involved coupled with things like getting to L2, stabilizing orbit, temperature stability and all the checks for the instruments on board along with the mirror deployment (since it's not one big sheet of mirror).

Here's a link which gives an idea about the logistics involved (along with a cool video series of the journey embedded): https://hackaday.com/2021/11/02/30-days-of-terror-the-logist...

To fathom how complex the sunshield deployment is (and that's just a part of the whole sequence), from the link above:

"Full deployment of the sunshield is without a doubt the sketchiest part of the whole process. The sunshield consists of five separate metalized Kapton sheets, each the size of three tennis courts. Each one must be unrolled, extended to its full size, tightened, and spaced out vertically for the sunshield to do its job. This takes the coordinated action of 140 release mechanisms, 70 hinges, eight deployment motors, about 400 pullies, and nearly 400 meters of cable to accomplish, not to mention the sensors, wiring harnesses, and computers to control everything. It’ll take the better part of two days to complete the sunshield deployment."

The whole thing is just insane.

From this talk by Dr. John Mather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RLGx_wgyAw

Around 1:47 you can see the number of people involved. 3 space agencies (ESA, NASA, CSA), over 3000 engineers and technicians and 100 scientists worldwide.

konschubert• 5 years ago

I guess every time after you unfold a thing, you want to check it behaves as expected and keeps behaving as expected before you unfold the next thing.

kortex4• 5 years ago

How does one even begin to engineer tests for such a sequence of events? Yeah you can test each step individually, but then you have all the integration effects. How do you know you have enough coverage?

$10B buys a lot of QA and I'm sure they try to engineer everything with the right margins, but it's still an unfathomable amount of state space.

Are there techniques to stay sane and manage risk without just throwing money at it? I feel like that kind of knowledge could be useful for software test development.

double0jimb0• 5 years ago

Systems Engineering is the discipline that oversees this. They define what tests will be required to validate the thing will do what it is supposed to before any hardware is built. I don’t think there is a good analogy to typical software QA, which is usually a “make sure it doesn’t break anything that already works” type of discipline.

jdiez172• 5 years ago

There's no real silver bullet other than applying the systems engineering process diligently. You start by writing down your user requirements (what the system needs to deliver), and you follow the thread of figuring out that "to do X, this subsystem has to provide conditions A, B, C..." recursively, in a breadth-first search. The level of detail codified in these functional, performance and interface requirements depends on the level of assurance you need.

Then, you need to validate that each requirement is met by your system. This can be done by test, analysis (mathematically proving some property), review of design, or inspection. It's true that you can't fully validate most space systems on Earth, because we can't simulate all environmental conditions simultaneously. That's why you ideally you want each requirement to be validated by two methods.

When you find anomalies due to integration effects, it's usually because your interface requirements are not specified well enough ;)

peterburkimsher3• 5 years ago

You gave the answer! Integration tests. And they work recursively, with a Kalman filter to approximate even in noisy conditions.

"USL was inspired by Hamilton's recognition of patterns or categories of errors occurring during Apollo software development. Errors at the interfaces between subsystem boundaries accounted for the majority of errors and were often the most subtle and most difficult to find. Each interface error was placed into a category identifying the means to prevent it by way of system definition. This process led to a set of six axioms, forming the basis for a mathematical constructive logical theory of control for designing systems that would eliminate entire classes of errors just by the way a system is defined.[3][4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Systems_Language

There's a diagram of rules on the USL Wikipedia page. The rules show triangle feedback loops with a parent, left, right child. Those are like generations of a Sierpiński triangle. Every part is trying to serve the Good Cause that it's working for, and love its neighbour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_realization

"any state-space model that is both controllable and observable and has the same input-output behaviour as the transfer function is said to be a minimal realization of the transfer function The realization is called "minimal" because it describes the system with the minimum number of states."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_control

"the problem of driving the output to a desired nonzero level can be solved after the zero output one is."

An electronic analogy: find GND, then solve for 1.

A common solution strategy in many optimal control problems is to solve for the costate (sometimes called the shadow price) A shadow price is a monetary value assigned to currently unknowable or difficult-to-calculate costs in the absence of correct market prices. It is based on the willingness to pay principle – the most accurate measure of the value of a good or service is what people are willing to give up in order to get it. The costate summarizes in one number the marginal value of expanding or contracting the state variable next turn.

Each part looks ahead 1 generation, chooses left or right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_decomposition

convert a representation of any linear time-invariant (LTI) control system to a form in which the system can be decomposed into a standard form which makes clear the observable and controllable components of the system

Take a big problem, break it down, look for I/O ports. Or in software test development: layers of abstraction. A suggestion: only add a layer of abstraction when it's too big to fit on the screen at once. Use tools like code folding, tree views.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_control

Optimise for time? When we're in a hurry we break things. Another suggestion: aim to minimise entropy, maximise connectedness.

Thank you for asking a good question, and thank you for reading! Let's go and tidy up this world together, in software and hardware.

smarx0072• 5 years ago

I would start with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Model. System designs of everything in automotive, aerospace etc are based on a V model.

wolverine8767• 5 years ago

Simple:

NASA Systems Engineering Handbook https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20170001761

That's the 2017 version; maybe there's a later one. IIRC, it's an abridged from NASA Expanded Guidance for SE, but my link to that is broken.

jacquesm5• 5 years ago

That's the difference between engineering and 'move fast and break stuff'.

Let's hope it all works out, if not, some expensive lessons are about to be learned.

virtue32• 5 years ago

The really scary thing is that because it's in L2 orbit (past the moon) it's not designed/intended to ever be serviced. So they can't go up and unfuck it if it's fucked.

im_down_w_otp• 5 years ago

That kind of exhaustive integrated/system-level testing is precisely the kind of thing we're trying to enable at Auxon, FWIW. A really rough sketch, for sake of brevity, of the approach is cribbing from property-based testing, mutation testing, and model checking and applying them to system & software interactions instead of programs, functions, and source code. Our users are often Systems Engineers by title or more often by circumstance.

chasd00• 5 years ago

the "fabric" tensioning looks really sketchy to me. i can barely get a fitted sheet tensioned correctly on my bed..

topspin• 5 years ago

JWST has something like 300 SPOFs in the deployment phase. Then there are operation issues; the MIRI cryocooler has had a long, troubled development history. Three weeks ago NASA put out a Hollywood production quality disclaimer video[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUAvXYW5bmI

belter3• 5 years ago

Suddenly extremely worried about this:

"James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interpreter by a bankrupt company "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737663

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252882358_Event-dri...

"The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will use an event-driven system architecture to provide efficient and flexible operations as initiated by a simplified, high-level ground command interface. Event-driven operations is provided through the use of an on-board COTS JavaScript engine hosted within the payload flight software..."

Edit: Found something ....Is it too late to postpone the launch?

https://www.stsci.edu/~idash/pub/dashevsky0607rcsgso.pdf

"...The JWST science operations will be driven by ASCII (instead of binary command blocks) on-board scripts, written in a customized version of JavaScript. The script interpreter is run by the flight software, which is written in C++. The flight software operates the spacecraft and the science instruments.

The on-board scripts will autonomously construct and issue commands, as well as telemetry requests, in real-time to the flight software, to direct the Observatory Subsystems (e.g., Science Instruments, Attitude Control, etc.)...

The flight software will execute the command sent by the calling on-board script and return telemetry, which will be evaluated in real-time by that on-board script. The calling script will then send status information to a higher-level on-board script, which contains the logic to skip forward in the observing plan in response to certain events (see Section 4.1)... "

Found it...

"JWST uses an extended version of JavaScript, which was developed as a COTS product called Nombas ScriptEase 5.00e. ScriptEase provides functionality common to many modern software languages and follows the ECMAScript standard."

http://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/toolkit/index.htm

http://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/toolkit/isdkdownload.htm

Latest errata from 2004, moving from worried to full panic mode...

http://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/devspace/errata/isdk/index...

jazzyjackson4• 5 years ago

it’s not running Node 0.10.0 for gods sake, it’s an interpreter to write jobs that scientists can use for their studies - the flight critical stuff is a different stack

grumpyprole• 5 years ago

I'd like to understand how such a pinnacle of human design and engineering came to depend on a technology that is, putting it politely, certainly not.

belter3• 5 years ago

Sounds like somebody at NASA should contact Brent Noorda.

"Nombas,Un-Incorporated" http://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm

He is in the critical path...

xenadu02• 5 years ago

It is common in such commercial agreements to provide source code or to escrow source code with a third party service with conditions that trigger release of the sources (eg bankruptcy or sale to another company that discontinues the product). So it is possible they have the full source.

It is also worth considering that the JS engine likely hasn't changed much (if at all) in the past 15 years. Its bugs and limits are well-known at this point.

It is also an interpreter which makes it slower* but less subject to vulnerabilities that impact the host. Honestly that's probably the correct choice for a spacecraft where reliability and safety is more important than performance.

Don't get me wrong: JavaScript is a big ball of WAT and nonsense we've spent way too much effort improving but I don't blame them for making the choice so long ago and sticking with a known quantity rather than risk introducing new problems by changing things.

* I once worked on a project that used IronJS to run JS in the .Net runtime. It took advantage of the runtime's JIT but was a lot of not terribly optimized F# code. I built a V8 bridge and was very excited for the increase in perf... but it got slower. It turned out most customer-written JS code spent most of its time using the API which was backed by C# code and that meant lots of bridging. At the time I left they were still using IronJS because it was faster for their workloads. It taught me the importance of testing your actual workload and taking a whole-system approach to perf.

johnisgood• 5 years ago

They really ought to look into Ada.

robbiewxyz• 5 years ago

From that video it appears the unfolding sequence is set to occur prior to the insertion burn into L2.

If the JWST will in fact spend almost a month in earth's orbit, does someone have an educated estimate on the magnitude of risk posed by space junk to nominal deployment?

Looking at those solar shields I imagine that they could be destroyed entirely by even the smallest of debris fragments. Same with the mirrors.

Edit: I'm wrong here (thanks @thethirdone). The burn set to occur after deployment is the L2 insertion burn and not the transfer insertion burn. Most of deployment will occur in the transfer orbit en route to L2, far away from earth-orbiting debris.

0x0nyandesu• 5 years ago

Basically none cause it's outside the typical orbit

ProjectArcturis• 5 years ago

It will orbit and deploy at the point where the Earth's and sun's gravity cancel out, which is far beyond most anything else, especially space junk.

thethirdone• 5 years ago

I interpreted "orbital insertion burn" to mean the stabilization into L2 burn. With that interpretation the unfolding occurs during its travel to L2 where there is little space debris.

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

We really need Starship in operation. It should be able to carry much larger objects into space - no need for complicated folding and unfolding mechanisms.

Starship could possibly take normal sized heavy equipment to other planets, such as heavy earth movers. (Not those with a combustion engine, but still useful.)

grishka• 5 years ago

Not even that — seeing how cheap Starship launches would be per kg of payload (I've seen a figure of $10), we could as well build a huge orbital station and just manufacture and/or assemble arbitrarily sized stuff in there or even in space. No atmosphere, and especially pesky oxygen, to deal with, no contaminants to keep out, no gravity to fight against. I'd imagine that any scientific and fabrication processes that need a deep vacuum would also greatly benefit from being done on a space station.

jcims2• 5 years ago

The one thing that I think starship has proven is that for any major mission that stretches our current launch capanilities, it may be worth investigating developing a new launch vehicle instead of accommodating the ones we have.

Just think of all the engineering and risk that’s going into a process that will be used once.

arlort• 5 years ago

I think if they had starship they'd have just built it foldable anyway but with a bigger mirror

peter303• 5 years ago

They should deploy in Earth orbit near the ISS, then move to L2. Would give option for repair.

The shuttle was decommissioned after the primary Webb design was done. What would have known the launch options at the time it was ready?

steve_taylor• 5 years ago

It’s probably too risky given all the debris in orbit.

idontwantthis• 5 years ago

You can't just put things in space wherever you want them and then move them whenever you want to or to wherever you want to.

callumprentice• 5 years ago

Thank you so much for both of those links. Absolutely fascinating - especially the Smarter Every Day channel which I wasn’t aware of. Excited to watch more of it.

whiteboardr• 5 years ago

Here’s hoping that “incident” a couple weeks ago will be the only one and everything will work out just fine.

This launch and perspective for science has me anxious and excited since its inception - and it’s been a while.

I will open a bottle of champagne when the first data will be sent from L2 with something along the “fully operational” lines.

Godspeed.

AustinDev• 5 years ago

I have an acquaintance that's been working on the team for this telescope for as long as I've known him ~10 years. He's had so many disappointments with the continued delays and issues. I hope for his sanity and his research this launch goes flawlessly.

m3kw9• 5 years ago

There will be annoying people saying - we have world hunger now, and you are spending 11b to looking at the universe 10b years ago???

podgaj9• 5 years ago

That would be me. If it is annoying to care about the suffering of those less fortunate so be it.

https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

In January 2020, there were 580,466 people experiencing homelessness in America. Most were individuals (70 percent), and the rest were people living in families with children. They lived in every state and territory, and they reflected the diversity of our country.

That $11B would give about $18000 to all of those people. At $1000 a monthly rent that would house them for nearly two years and would most likely help them to stabilize their lives. Plus it would pump more money into the economy.

You will never find the end of the universe, or know why it began. And if you do find out, what is the purpose? Will it help you love another human being more? No, you will invent something else you need to discover.

kortex4• 5 years ago

We're not yeeting $11B USD into a Lagrange halo orbit. It's funding STEM jobs.

Yes we should have UBI but like, that doesn't meant we can't do science at the same time. Maybe look to the MIC to cut first.

kataklasm• 5 years ago

That $11B would give about $18000 to all of those people. At $1000 a monthly rent that would house them for nearly two years […].

Let's not change algebra to fit our conclusions, shall we?

I really don't understand how people are getting angry at $11B in space exploration funding. Consider the following:

a. Go through some of the cutting-edge technologies humankind has at its disposal nowadays (yes, yes, the kids starving in Africa do not, but that's an entire new tangent) and have a look at how they were invented. Chances are a lot of them originate in space exploration or space experiments. Modern navigation systems that power basically any systems you can think off that you use everyday. The high-tech tracking systems making sure the laser scalpel during LASIK eye surgery doesn't destroy your sight but rather restores it? Yea that was developed from a program that developed automated docking and rendezvous laser tracking systems for space dockings.

b. Can't you think of many more money sinks that would deserve to get defunded before thinking of space exploration? How about you start with the US Military? Last year the US spent over $750B on defense costs, that's over 68x the $11B figure quoted for James Webb. Surely we can deduct a billion or two here and there? You know what? that'd be double positive since you wouldn't create a whole portion of hungry humans at the same time since you're not going to war with half the world anymore. Stop the stupid fucking military complex first, then you can talk about defunding space exploration.

dahfizz• 5 years ago

We already spend over a trillion dollars a year on various welfare programs[1]. Throwing more money at social issues will not help.

Plus it would pump more money into the economy.

It would "pump" money straight into the pockets of landlords. Its not like the money spent on JWT was shredded...

[1] https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS%20Report%20-...

jcun4128• 5 years ago

I just hope these donations make it to the people, I donate to things like this (now including this one) and hope it makes a difference.

SonicScrub• 5 years ago

If you give one person $1000 per month, you can improve that person's life with next to zero external consequences. If an organization gives half a million people $1000 per month, the external macro economic impacts must be considered. Societal quality of life improvement is not as simple as in the single-person example. You can't scale one up one to the other and expect the individual result to similarly scale.

If you doubt this true, consider the fact that the US Government currently spends upwards of $1 Trillion /year on welfare programs per year. That is money specifically dedicated to poverty elimination and/or management. An amount that makes the James Web 0.44 billion /year over 25 years look like a rounding error. By your numbers, that $1 Trillion could be used to give each of the ~0.5 million homeless around $1.7 million per year. If it's this simple, why hasn't it been done? Is your assumption about how poverty elimination is as simple as throwing money perhaps incorrect? What do you know that the US Federal government doesn't?

FYI emotional appeals about how a telescope can't help us love each other will do you no favours here. Likewise with implications that you are the only one who cares about homelessness, or that one cannot care about both homelessness and space exploration at the same time.

jallen_dot_dev2• 5 years ago

That $11B would give about $18000 to all of those people.

Unfortunately you can't just live inside a pile of cash. The problems surrounding homelessness are slightly more complicated than you are letting on, and "we spent the money to buy a telescope instead" is not one of them.

rurp• 5 years ago

How many homeless people could be housed if we spent "only" 500 billion on the millitary each year? Or made billionaires pay a paltry 10% tax rate? Or stopped subsidizing oil and gas companies?

Any one of those changes would directly provide orders of magnitude more funds than scrapping this telescope. Getting worked up over such a relatively tiny expense with such longtail upside seems like a crazy place to focus on cutting costs.

imglorp• 5 years ago

Explicitly ordering our priorities is probably a good conversation to have; better to have it in the open than hidden in a pork bill somewhere.

We should also talk about fossil fuel subsidies ~5T/yr (!), infra $1.2T (one time), defense at $768B/yr, etc etc.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...

trasz2• 5 years ago

11 billion is less than a single aircraft carrier, of which US has already built several. There are better things to cut funding to than a one of a kind telescope.

panick21_9• 5 years ago

Yeah, the world should never ever invest in future technology or science unless all problems in the world are solved. With that attitude we would still live in the stone age.

Those problems are political and most them already get much money spent on them. World Hunger is already being fought with lots and lots of money. And it turns out its not actually really a money problem.

cheschire• 5 years ago

If someone ever wanted to understand what a space force might provide, consider what happens when someone wants to use one of the lagrange points for their own purpose, and it's currently occupied by someone they don't like.

There's more to what any military force brings, obviously, both positive and negative. It's just sometimes when discussing the purpose of a military with others, the concept seems a little too fuzzy because most resources seem broadly available enough that they could easily be shared from a laypersons perspective. Lagrange points are very finite.

edit: apparently the area contained within a lagrange point is larger than I expected. Negates my point.

pohl• 5 years ago

How would a space force take possession of a lagrage point, though, without creating a permanent field of dangerous debris?

xyzzyz• 5 years ago

Rendezvous, attach booster, and deorbit, or just fly away?

simcop2387• 5 years ago

Only reasonable way at the moment would be some kind of satellite capture system that nobody has publicly demonstrated.

cgriswald3• 5 years ago

None of the ideas in the sibling comments (to my post) will work, because they ignore the fact that enemies will employ counter-measures which may cause debris to be formed. In the extreme case, a nation's military may decide to deny the area to anyone rather than lose their own access, intentionally creating such a debris field.

m4rtink2• 5 years ago

AFAIK Lagrange points are not fully stable, so any debris cloud will likely disperse into the Solar orbit, which is kinda big.

ziotom78• 5 years ago

You make it look as if one should stay exactly on the Lagrangean point to appreciate its benefits.

The reality is that spacecrafts fly on very large orbits around these points: the Planck spacecraft followed a 400,000 km-wide orbit [1] around the Sun-Earth L₂ point, and this is the same for many other spacecrafts that have flown around that place.

400,000 km is ~30 times larger than the Earth's diameter. Unless somebody has nasty intentions like e.g. purposefully crashing their own spacecraft against some other, there is no reason to be worried. There is more space around these points than here on Earth.

[1] https://sci.esa.int/web/planck/-/34728-orbit-navigation

WaxProlix• 5 years ago

I don't think there's much ambiguity around a military's utility in forcefully enclosing the commons, or claiming extranational resources at gunpoint. I suspect people who are leery of a 'Space Force' have other reasons to feel that way. And I'd hope there are other ways of managing the sharing of things like Lagrange points than outright violence (though I suppose some body must have the capability to employ force or else any agreements made would be easily violated, yadda yadda).

jakeinspace• 5 years ago

You don't need to reach the exact Lagrange point and reduce your velocity relative to it to 0. James Webb will be orbiting the Sun-Earth L2 with an apogee of nearly a million miles. There is a ridiculous amount of room for craft to orbit L2, just like there is to orbit Earth (beyond LEO).

bdcp• 5 years ago

Also there are other satellites at L2 already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...

It's really a none issue

cgriswald3• 5 years ago

The United States Air Force started off as a division of the United States Army Signal Corps. It didn't become its own branch of the military until after 40 years and two world wars.

Lack of a "space force" doesn't mean lack of military capability in space.

sahil50• 5 years ago

I expect we'll see more mature galaxies in the distant universe.

This is a glaring problem for the standard model (big bang LCDM) right now.

XMM-2599, SPT0418-47, MRG-M2129, all mature galaxies, far away

arcastroe• 5 years ago

That seems like an interesting test for the big circus model. If the JWST largely sees galaxies in early formation at those distances, would you consider the big circus model refuted?

metalliqaz• 5 years ago

something tells me he wouldn't

samstave• 5 years ago

Phil Mosby, the guy who did the Webb inspired piece that Nasa bought and hung in their library is from Tahoe and good friends with my brother... we have one of his pieces hanging in our living room, but whats REALLY cool is his astro-calendar (a calendar with a whole bunch of space facts and beautiful pics.. Highly recommend...

https://i.imgur.com/B7aA3Xw.jpg

TrainedMonkey• 5 years ago

I wonder how much of the vehicle's final cost is directly attributable to the complexity of deployment. I.E. how much easier would this be if we had a launch vehicle with a fairing capable of fitting fully deployed configuration.

bregma2• 5 years ago

You would probably make up for the cost savings by building something strong enough to withstand the forces of achieving Earth escape velocity in a fully deployed configuration, not to mention all the increased mass that would be required.

Since it's impossible to do maintenance on this observatory while it's in solar orbit, and since launches have strong vibrations and forces, it's important that the delicate and sensitive equipment be stowed in a way to minimize the effects of launch forces and minimizate the requirements for after-launch maintenance.

pirate787• 5 years ago

This is exactly the promise of SpaceX Starship.

jltsiren• 5 years ago

The Starship is way too small to carry the fully deployed James Webb telescope. The sunshield is roughly 20 m x 14 m, while the diameter of the Starship is only 9 m.

gvv• 5 years ago

For those complaining about the spending: some countries spent TRILLIONS on war and and nation building. It's developments like these we should be focusing our energy and intelect.

cogman105• 5 years ago

$11 billion for a 10 year mission is peanuts in modern government operating expenses. It's not even $11 billion for 10 years, but already spent money over something like 15 years.

So, roughly $11 billion over 25 years. Something that many nations could afford.

throwoutway• 5 years ago

Well not 25 years of use though

wmeredith• 5 years ago

For perspective, the United States was spending $11 billion dollars every 90 days fighting the Afghan war from ~2001-2020.

bregma2• 5 years ago

But I'm sure this project will have many technological spinoffs that could, with only a little additional funding, be used either to kill a lot of people or to generate personal wealth for at least a few select individuals (and those are not mutually exclusive). It's a bargain at twice the price.

justajot• 5 years ago

Just for reference, the total U.S. Department of Defense budget for 2021 was $705 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

systemvoltage3• 5 years ago

This is a poor argument and poor reasoning. This way, instead of improving, we continue to regress (“Look there! They’re doing it too!” argument). We should be halving expense on all fronts while demanding the same output - whether it’s military or space spending. Look at ISRO’s budget, high efficiency is key.

Just because DoD budget is $750b, doesn’t mean that we should have a free pass to waste money. I’d like to see DoD spending cut in half while holding vendors accountable. Same with space industry.

Another way to think about this if it helps is for $11b, we should have gotten more done. Imagine James Webb Telescope + 5 more projects for the same $11b. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

gifnamething• 5 years ago

That's barely enough for a negative revenue electric vehicle startup these days

kdmccormick• 5 years ago

I think GP's parent is a fair argument against criticisms that start and end at "$11B is a lot of money!". It is valid to point out that $11B pales in comparison to the US's defense budget as a means of providing context for how big these really big numbers are.

If someone were to point to specific ways in which the project wasted money, that'd be different. But I haven't seen such detailed criticisms.

Nobody is arguing that wasting money is a good thing.

scrubs2• 5 years ago

Totally agree. Since when would it kill us to manage money better regardless of the node on the organizational chart to which it belongs? Never.

dotnet00• 5 years ago

An ISRO comparison seems a bit absurd given the hugely different scales of science and technology development being done. Much of the technology used in the JWST was practically invented for it.

Not to imply that ISRO isn't doing important work, but simply looking to cut costs for the sake of cutting costs is just as bad as the waste you're complaining about. It'd be like comparing whatever it cost TSMC to switch to 3nm to what it cost to setup 20nm fabs.

What we should be pushing for is more accurate cost estimates. It isn't a problem that the latest and greatest in space telescopes cost $11B, technological progress is often expensive, it's a problem that initially we were told it would cost $2B. If we have a better cost estimate from the start, we can better control our expectations.

deltree7• 5 years ago

or you can let a country have multiple billionaires so that they can fund these projects with their own money and compete within themselves, take more risks and compress the timelines of frontier-conquering and innovation.

But, we want a large bureaucratic organization (by design), extremely risk-averse(by design), extremely slow(by design), having only one shots (by design) to do this for us

panick21_9• 5 years ago

While true, its also a huge problem when contractors promise something for 2B$ and then it costs 10-15B$ without the contractors suffering any consequences. What stops them from doing that for every single contract?

There is a reason recently NASA has started to focus on Fixed Price contracts.

We need a shift to more missions, building these things more often and more on price. Putting absurd amount of money into 1 mission compared to 20 missions for 500M$ likely doesn't make sense.

The Webb telescope has been so long in development that lots of subsystems could have evolved considerably since then.

scrubs2• 5 years ago

Agreed: there must be consequences. And this human management problem is not specific to science nor cosmology. The total dollars sunk into research is small compared to revenues spent elsewhere. Heck, in the US Government, it is still not yet using its check book leverage to reduce drug prices.

nexuist2• 5 years ago

We need a shift to more missions, building these things more often and more on price

This only very recently became financially reasonable with SpaceX. It would have been impossible for NASA to know at that time that private industry would manage to lower the cost of launch by magnitudes.

Cost didn't matter back then because you only got one shot to launch anyways. If the rocket blew up and took the satellite with it you're never getting approval to launch again. It would be better to let the project overrun than to worry about financials and contractual obligations when the risk of cancellation or failure is already so high. But now, with launches being relatively cheap, it is actually possible to envision a backup plan where a second satellite goes up with a second rocket. Again, this only very recently (maybe ~5 years ago?) became possible.

I agree with you now though - NASA ought to be reconsidering overhauling its procurement process now that Falcon 9 exists.

mendigou• 5 years ago

There is considerable effort on this direction already. A lot of the bus (on board computers, power, etc.) is standardized for a lot of missions.

But there's always have uncertainty in the payloads. First, because there are lots of contractors involved. That's somewhat fixable.

Second, and most important, is that many of these payloads are cutting-edge. They've never been built before and some of them push physical and engineering limits. I've worked on missions where the only delay was the payload for many years, and they were simpler than JWST.

It's a problem of not knowing what we don't know. When working on those kinds of systems, the estimates lose a lot of meaning.

yboris• 5 years ago

With $11B why can't we funnel all that money into _fusion_ research? Feels like a bigger payoff than anything this could bring :/

cogman105• 5 years ago

Good news, since the JWST started the US alone has pushed in $7.087 billion dollars into fusion research [1]

By the time it finishes it's mission we're likely to have exceeded that $11 billion budget in fusion research.

Unfortunately, I don't think fusion is something simply solved by more money.

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/

afroboy• 5 years ago

Shouldn't you say that about the US military budget that goes over 7OO billion dollar each year?

pixelpoet• 5 years ago

Aside: those alphabetical O's you used instead of zeros are super jarring!

panick21_9• 5 years ago

I simply fail to understand people obsession with fusion. We have failed to take advantage of fission. Fusion really does nothing remotely practical that Fusion doesn't do just as well and actually far better. Fission does it with 60-70 technology. Fusion takes incredibly expensive future technology.

Fusion has no practical application other then some super advanced spaceflight situations maybe.

Fission is 10^12 more dense then oil, Fusion gets that to 10^15. If we are not willing to make the effort for 12 orders of magnitude, why would anybody care about a couple more?

sadfev2• 5 years ago

It’s not going up. ESA’s incompetence makes sure that this telescope doesn’t see the light of space.

sadfev2• 5 years ago

This is a perpetually failed project waste tax payer money on incompetent scientists and engineers.

#NotAScienceEquipment #wontlaunch

marricks• 5 years ago

I'd much rather my tax dollars be spent on 11B failed telescopes than failed trillion dollar fighter jets. Or really most other defense project to be honest.

digitcatphd• 5 years ago

Splendid

It is destined for a point in space 1.5 million kilometres from Earth — too far away for astronauts to visit and fix the telescope if something goes wrong. Hubble required an after-launch repair in 1993, when astronauts used the space shuttle to get to the Earth-orbiting observatory and install corrective optics for its primary mirror, which had been improperly ground.

gadnuk9• 5 years ago

The whole Hubble mirror fiasco was fascinating. The before and after images of the galaxy M100 in the following link outlines the extent of the error:

https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw

One may assume that maybe the error was simply too big and that's why the aberration. Here's the root cause and the magnitude of the error would be dismissed as nothing by most people on this planet but ultimately turned out to be huge!

"Ultimately the problem was traced to miscalibrated equipment during the mirror's manufacture. The result was a mirror with an aberration one-50th the thickness of a human hair, in the grinding of the mirror."

a9h74j2• 5 years ago

That's huge. Everyday profile accuracy can be spoken of in "quarter wavelength"-like terms.

panick21_9• 5 years ago

The problem is that this actually makes no sense. For the price and cost of the Shuttle missions, a new even better Hubble could have been built.

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

Probably would have been bad optics to let the first one become space junk.

cryptoz2• 5 years ago

I have started to wonder, will it ever be possible to 'see' the big bang? How close can we get to measuring that far back? From what I've seen JWST will be able to peer back to just a few hundred million years after the big bang. What are the limit to seeing even further back? Is it a matter of telescope size, will an even larger telescope by definition be able to see even further back? What is the limit?

gadnuk9• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, we cannot, or will not be able to see the Big Bang. The simple reason is, it's just beyond our reach.

For the first few hundred thousand years, the universe was opaque.

This link goes into a good amount of detail about the first light in the universe:

https://phys.org/news/2016-11-universe.html

We might be able to see a bit closer to the events after the Big Bang with a more powerful telescope in the future, but I don't think we can ever be able to actually "see" the Big Bang.

cryptoz2• 5 years ago

Fantastic link, thanks for that. Got me even more excited for JWST!

__MatrixMan__• 5 years ago

The CMB shows the universe at the point where its density became low enough that photons could move around freely. That's the furthest point that we can "see" if you required "seeing" to have to do with electromagnetic radiation.

But there are other types of radiation that penetrate dense matter better: neutrinos and gravity waves. Right now it's "holy shit I saw one" for both kinds, so we're a long way off from doing any kind of imaging in those media. But if we ever manage detectors large enough and sensitive enough, we should be able to take "pictures" of the universe when it was even younger than when the CMB was released.

Dense enough matter will stop neutrinos, so that signal will be further back, but not the bang itself. So far as we know, nothing stops gravity--so that signal ought to be... interesting.

(Or at least, that's what Lee Smolin says in his book: Time Reborn)

josho3• 5 years ago

What exactly are we hoping to learn from the telescope? I understand that it will allow us to see farther than ever before, and that is exciting. But, there must be a list of hypotheses that astronomers are planning to test. None of the videos/articles I've found actually speak to the specific discoveries we are hoping to make. Is it simply that the science is so advanced that it's out of reach for a layman?

doctoboggan2• 5 years ago

What I am most excited for is the experiments using this scope to analyse the atmospheres of exoplanets. The goal is to look for signs of like like high quantities of methane.

josho3• 5 years ago

I think the article touched on that, but your second sentence gave the context of why looking at the atmosphere is interesting. Thank you.

And yeh, that is exciting!

wefarrell• 5 years ago

Webb has four mission science goals:

- Search for the first galaxies or luminous objects that formed after the Big Bang.

- Determine how galaxies evolved from their formation until the present.

- Observe the formation of stars from the first stages to the formation of planetary systems.

- Measure the physical and chemical properties of planetary systems and investigate the potential for life in those systems.

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html#goals

josho3• 5 years ago

Those are great thank you!

I suppose I'm also hoping to go deeper. Like how is this going to help us understand how galaxies evolve? I suppose it will because we can see farther and so younger galaxies, and compare that to older galaxies to learn more about how they change.

I guess I'll have to wait for science to do it's thing and then we'll likely have lots of information to explain it all. Right now it wouldn't be a particularly compelling book to write.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 5 years ago

It will be the most expensive fireworks if it explodes on the launchpad.

FiberBundle• 5 years ago

Given that this will be at a distance of more than a million miles from earth, I would assume that missions to repair the telescope are likely not an option. So how long is jwst expected to live? Is it extremely unlikely to collide with any objects at such a distance from earth?

gadnuk9• 5 years ago

NASA did add docking capability to JWST for future servicing:

https://www.space.com/3833-nasa-adds-docking-capability-spac...

That article is from 2007 but it still had the docking ring as of 2013. Can't find any recent ones that confirm if it will still have the docking ring at launch.

But I don't think we have the capability as of now to actually service it in case something goes wrong. But given how technology is advancing, maybe we can when JWST reaches EOL in 10 years.

nend• 5 years ago

So how long is jwst expected to live?

I was surprised to find out, 5-10 years. I was expecting longer.

qwertyuiop_2• 5 years ago

Didn’t they just drop it ?

jordanpg• 5 years ago

Will JWST send back pictures comparable (presumably better?) to the ones Hubble takes?

Those famous Hubble pictures are the defining images of a generation of scientists and dreamers. Are we about to get an update of those?

Or is this mission about the data?

gadnuk9• 5 years ago

Yes, JWST will send back pictures. But since JWST operates in infrared as compared to Hubble (mostly optical and ultraviolet wavelengths), the pictures would look different.

Here is a comparison of what pics look like in visible vs infrared (both taken by Hubble, since it has some infrared capability):

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/comparisonWebbVsHubb...

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/james-webb-space-telesc...

s0ulphire• 5 years ago

John Mather goes into detail on this in the "Making data beautiful" podcast episode, check it out here https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2009/06/18/pod...

dtgriscom• 5 years ago

I'm a big fan of prediction markets, where people wager their own money on clear yes/no propositions, and you get a payoff if you buy shares on the winning side. It's a great way to tap the "wisdom of the crowd," even if you don't put up your own money.

Which brings me to the JWST. I'd love to know how likely it is that this amazing (and amazingly complex) tool actually succeeds in its goals. There's no way I could figure it out myself; I'd have to take someone else's word for it. Unless... there is a prediction market somewhere betting on whether the JWST will succeed, so I can piggyback on others' research and self-interest. I haven't been able to find one though. (Perhaps people think betting "against" success is too macabre.)

Anyone want to throw out a likelihood of success? (My WAG: 70%.)

Uehreka• 5 years ago

I don’t find prediction markets too convincing, especially after my experience betting on the US election last year. One month after the election there were still markets with greater than 10% odds on Trump winning states that had already certified Biden.

It was great for me, I made some good money, but it definitely downgraded prediction markets in my mind from “uncannily accurate” to “good but not perfect”. They’re not going to predict Black Swans or other odd things in a way you can rely on.

1970-01-01• 5 years ago

Irony:

JWST has been estimated to be 800% - 2000% over budget.

James Webb was also director for the Office of Management and Budget, 1946 – 1949.

mwattsun• 5 years ago

Shout out to the good folks of Delta, Utah, some of whom work in the Beryllium mines nearby. My car broke down there once and I learned that Beryllium is a vital component in the JWST because it doesn't expand or contract as the sun warms it.

Digging Beryllium for James Webb

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148574/digging-bery...

I also learned that I actually broke down inside another telescope:

The Telescope Array project is a collaboration between universities and institutions in the United States, Japan, Korea, Russia, and Belgium. The experiment is designed to observe air showers induced by cosmic rays with extremely high energy. It does this using a combination of ground array and air-fluorescence techniques...The Telescope Array observes cosmic rays with energies greater than 1018eV. The surface array samples events over 300 square miles of desert.

http://www.telescopearray.org/

ItsBob• 5 years ago

I've honestly not been as excited (in astronomy-terms I mean :D) about science as I am about the James Webb telescope. I can't wait to see what it shows

novaRom• 5 years ago

I hope if Webb will be successfully operating, we'll get significant progress in the question of the life origin. Abiogenesis is predetermined and common.

The $11B Webb telescope aims to probe the early universe

Related Stories