Mark Megahan
Taking us “deeper into the universe” than ever before, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch on December 18. To get some free momentum from Mother Earth, the cargo rocket will blast off from an equatorial spaceport in French Guiana. What makes the Webb telescope so special is the Ninja class origami way it unfolds.
Universe as never seen before
The farthest reaches of the universe are soon to be at every astronomer’s fingertips. The engineers promise that quietly, without fuss, the Webb telescope’s gold, hexagonal shaped mirrors will be “unlocking in a smooth ballet of technology,” just like the ship of Wowbagger, the infinitely prolonged.
If all goes according to plan and everything still works after it’s been blasted into space, that is.
If you thought the images from Hubble were spectacular, then hang onto your hat. It says in the sales brochure that the James Webb Space Telescope is “NASA’s premier observatory of the next decade.”
After ten years of design and construction the big day for launch is coming up quick. This “world’s most powerful complex space observatory will answer questions about our solar system, study exoplanets in new ways and look deeper into the universe than we’ve ever been able to.”
Not only can it spot alien worlds all across the universe, it can analyze the atmosphere around them to see if we might be able to live there. If it’s close enough to our specs then maybe something else is living there.
“Webb will peer into the very atmospheres of exoplanets, some of which are potentially habitable, and could uncover clues in the ongoing search for life outside of Earth.”
Ninja origami
Able to collect a whole lot more light from distant objects at the edge of our universe than anything ever before, Webb is such a powerful instrument due to its huge 6.5 meter mirror.
The tricky part is trying to stuff 21 feet of gold plated quartz into a carton for shipping. That’s where the Escher-like origami comes in. It’s built from “18 hexagonal gold-coated segments, each 4.3 feet (1.32 meters) in diameter.”
According to NASA, “its size created a unique problem. The mirror was so large that it couldn’t fit inside a rocket. So they designed the telescope as a series of moving parts that can fold origami-style and fit inside a 16-foot (5-meter) space for launch.”
After all, it is “nearly 60 times larger than previous space telescopes.” The biggest in the known universe.
The mirror segments are covered in gold because it’s expected to “act as an infrared detective, detecting light that is invisible to us and revealing otherwise hidden regions of space.” They’re also keeping their fingers crossed.
The recently launched Lucy probe had a technical glitch in it’s origami mechanism to unfold the power panels. Both opened, one didn’t lock into place. The whole craft is functioning normally, other than that. It’s so infuriating not to be able to reach across the universe to give it a little nudge. The engineers are playing with their model and working out a solution, but haven’t wrapped their heads around it yet.
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