Meet the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope will be far more powerful and allow cosmologists and astronomers to glimpse the universe as it was at the beginning. For a telescope, the farther it can see, the farther back in time it can see. The light of the most distant galaxies left them on its long journey billions of years ago, and so it represents them as they were in the long past, not as they are.
"...the JWST is packed with some super high-end equipment. A tennis-court sized sun-shield will fold out after launch, along with a 21-foot primary mirror made of ultra-lightweight beryllium optics (compared to the 8 foot mirror aboard the Hubble).
Its three main imaging devices detect in the near- and mid-range infrared spectrum (great for seeing through enormous dust and gas clouds). The observatory will also include a Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) and Tunable Filter module to stabilize the image and perform narrow-band imaging, respectively. These will allow the JWST to peer deeper and more clearly into the ether than the Hubble ever could. An on-board cryogenics module will be used to keep the detectors at a frosty 39 Kelvin and prevent the spacecraft's own heat from interfering with readings."
I can't wait to see what the JWST sees.
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