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Friday, 14 January 2011, 15:30 in AQ3154
Prof. John Mather (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
James Webb Space Telescope: Progress and scientific promise (physics colloquium)
The James Webb Space Telescope is the planned successor for the Hubble Space Telescope, and will extend the reach of astronomers farther out in space and farther back in time, to within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang. Designed to observe at wavelengths from 0.6 to 28 μm, it will open new frontiers in science. With its huge aperture of 6.5 meters, and its optics cooled to 40 K, it will probe the unknown with extraordinary sensitivity. It will be used to study beginnings: the first luminous objects to form after the Big Bang, the first galaxies, perhaps the first black holes, and closer to home, the formation of stars like the Sun and planets like the Earth, and even the atmospheres of planets around other stars. I will show the design for the telescope and explain how it will operate in deep space, a million miles from the Earth at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. The observatory is under construction and the hardest technical problems have been solved.
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Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01