We Just Parked a Telescope a Million Miles in Space to Peer Deep Into the Origins of Time – Opinion

This story is not meant for people who are cynical or lack national pride.

NASA and its team of extremely smart people placed the powerful, seven-ton new telescope in solar orbit, after almost 40 years spent dreaming, planning and designing, building and testing.

It’s capable of detecting infrared light that’s been traveling through the void of space at the speed of light since the earliest moments in time. This is more than 13 million Earth years ago.

The new telescope’s success so far is just one of our nation’s numerous recent space achievements: Landing robots to explore Mars. Flying a research robot through the Sun’s aura. In the Fall of 2023, stealing a piece of primordial soil off a distant star and returning it to Earth.

Voyager I, the little spacecraft that was launched in 1977, is now 10 years old and has reached interstellar distance, averaging 38,210 miles per hour. The loyal little craft still reports in daily via radio signals that take 19 hours to reach NASA’s giant Goldstone dish in California.

On Christmas Day the James Webb Space Telescope was launched at a cost of $10 billion. This seemed like quite a bit until about a year ago, when Washington became the home of a particular political party and started spending many trillions.

The 14,300-pound observatory, weighing 14 tons, has traveled a quarter of a million miles to reach its designated parking spot. It will orbit the Sun with Earth since its launch.

The craft was able to accept and execute complex orders for solar panel deployment and sunshield spreading. It is the same size as a tennis court.

Infrared light is perceived by humans as heat. The instruments and mirrors must be kept frigid — assuming you consider minus-380 degrees Fahrenheit frigid — to detect the faint heat signatures traveling through space.

The craft also flawlessly unfolded and locked into place its 18 delicate, gold-covered mirrors, a total span of 21.3 feet, to detect the weakest light ever “seen” by humans.

Many things could have happened that would have negatively affected the mission. But they didn’t, a tribute to the painstaking planning and testing by NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and their corporate and international partners that delayed the launch for years.

The craft’s trajectory and movements, ending with a five-minute braking rocket burn Monday, went so smoothly and precisely that precious maneuvering fuel was conserved, likely doubling the telescope’s scheduled 10-year operational lifespan.

There are more glitches that can be encountered before images are uploaded to the internet in summer. Each of the telescope’s 18 mirrors, for instance, has seven separate devices to adjust its angles one nanometer at a time to refine the collective focus on the weak incoming starlight.

This craft can be seen facing the Sun in deep space. There, the gravitational pulls of both bodies are balanced to help stabilize its own “little” holding orbit, which is actually larger than the Moon’s orbit around Earth as both orbit the Sun.

The Webb telescope has a 100-fold greater power than the Hubble Space Telescope. It was launched in 1990 and has provided thousands of images, including stunning views of distant galaxies and clouds of gas and dust, as well as star nurseries, where new stars continue to form.

Webb should be able to “see” through ever-expanding space far beyond anything yet recorded, back perhaps to within a few hundred million years of the original Big Bang.

Nearly 25% of the time that it takes to complete its first mission will be spent on exploring almost 4,500 confirmed exoplanets within our Milky Way. This includes newly-discovered Earth-like worlds whose relationships to their stars indicate life. You could find many more.

Webb’s powerful mirrors and spectrometers will detect the composition of the atmospheres of those distant bodies. Others, known as Super-Earths or rocky bodies, may be mere rocks, while others are more complex and mysterious. They are up to 10x larger than the Earth, and some even closer to the stars of their planets.

Since childhood, when I attempted to map the space between our Ohio rural fields with my little pencils, the scale of space has fascinated me. After an hour of the exercise using the innocent eyes of an 8-year-old, my father observed that all the stars had moved.

“No,” he said, “we have.” Planet Earth, it turns out, is moving through space at eight miles per second and rotating about 500 miles an hour at the same time.

Eight minutes and twenty seconds are required for sunlight to travel at 186,000 miles an hour. This light could travel 587,625,370,000 miles in one light-year.

You probably know of Orion’s Belt, those three bright stars in a row in our night sky. Take a look up at this night. The flash of light you are seeing has been moving toward your eyes ever since the Siege de Thessalonica was over and St. Agatho took his brief reign as Pope.

That’s 1,344 light-years multiplied times 5.878,625,370,000 miles. Math was not my strength, so I’ll leave you to calculate the total distance of that light beam’s journey.

Now, if all goes well in the next several months of set-up and adjustments, the Webb Telescope will begin capturing light that’s been traveling toward its gold mirrors for around 13,000,000,000 years, about eight billion years longer than the spinning Earth that launched that telescope 31 days ago.