EFE.- The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled for December 22, has been delayed by at least two days, so that the device, considered the successor to Hubble, will not be sent into space before Friday December 24.
The new delay is due to a communication problem between the observatory and the launch vehicle system., according to the website of the US Space Agency (NASA), which hopes to be able to provide new information about the launch before December 17.
The James Webb Space Telescope, named after a former NASA administrator, will be the world’s largest space science observatory when launched, capable of surveying hitherto inaccessible worlds and exploring the origins of our solar system.
This joint mission of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency will be launched into space from the European spaceport in French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket on which the telescope has been secured this end of week.
The launch of the telescope, which was originally due to go into orbit in spring 2019, has been delayed for at least three other times.
The delay was confirmed at this time at a press conference by some of the main ESA scientists participating in the mission and who preferred not to elaborate on the subject so as not to give rise to speculation.
Catarina Alves de Oliveira, ESA scientist for Webb’s NIRSpec instrument, explained that the telescope has been evaluated for a long time and many tests have been done to ensure that everything will go well, from launch to deployment in orbit.
“There are very critical and ambitious parts to the whole process” but James Webb “is ready” to deploy in space and later, when it is in orbit, “we are going to proceed very slowly, without taking risks. We will always stop before each big step to ensure that everything goes well and we will be in constant communication with him ”.
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And it is that, although the team has rigorously tested the telescope, when it separates from the rocket and begins its journey towards the orbit in which it will operate for the next few years, the James Webb will go through a complex process to unfold in various stages and release its parasol , the antenna and the instruments with which it is equipped.
“It is a very tried and tested process that we will all be very aware of,” said Macarena García Marín, ESA scientist for the development and scientific support and calibration of MIRI / JWST.
When it begins to operate, the telescope will conduct part of its observations outside the Solar System. Exoplanets, for example, will be one of the pillars of this mission, has explained Alves de Oliveira.
“In the first year of observations, the Webb -which has received more than a thousand research proposals from scientific teams from all over the world- will dedicate 20-25% of the observation time to study some 60 or 70 exoplanets.
“We want to know what they are made of, what they have in the atmosphere and for that Webb will allow us to make very precise observations that will help us to know what structure and molecules are in those planets, and that’s only the first year ”, he stressed.
Within the Solar System, the telescope will study planets beyond Earth, such as gas giants and icy planets, but above all it will focus a lot on observing the atmospheres and the structure of those planets. “Webb is going to give us the details,” stressed Macarena García Marín, ESA scientist for the development and scientific support and calibration of MIRI / JWST.
Of course, compared to Hubble, the new telescope has a drawback: it will not be able to be repairedIn fact, it wasn’t even designed for that, ESA scientists have explained.
However, all electronic systems have redundancies called “side A and side B”, pointed out Macarena García, so that “whenever there is an anomaly, we can deal with them by going to side B, which ensures that you can continue using the instruments. ”.
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