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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The $8.8bn Nasa telescope that is 100 times more powerful than Hubble and will let us look back into the dawn of time

From the Daily Mail: The $8.8bn Nasa telescope that is 100 times more powerful than Hubble and will let us look back into the dawn of time


It’s one of the most technologically advanced devices ever built and will give cosmologists incredible insights into the origins of the universe.



Nasa's James Webb Telescope, if it’s a success, will herald a new era in the understanding of the universe, because it will be able to look further back in time, and with more clarity, than any telescope that exists today.



Nasa boasts that the telescope is 100 times more powerful that the Hubble, a device that has already given star-gazers thousands of stunning images of the cosmos.



But the project has a dark side - it is costing the U.S. space agency so much money that it is acting like a financial black hole, sucking funds away from other projects and threatening their future.



The telescope began as a $500million project in the late 1990s, but that cost has now ballooned to over $8.8billion.



Last year Congress tried to permanently halt the project. It’s all systems go at the moment, but it’s such a drain on Nasa’s budget that the agency may only be able to afford one big science mission per decade from now on, with some key projects killed off.



For example, House Science Committee staff warn that a mission to bring Martian soil back to Earth may now be too expensive to carry out.



Not only that, but Webb will sit much further out into space.



Hubble is in orbit 350 miles above the Earth. Webb will gaze into the cosmos almost a million miles from Earth.



The area of Webb’s mirror, meanwhile, is six and a quarter times larger than Hubble’s. The larger primary mirror the more light from objects the telescope can see.



It will also have new communications networks to transmit and store large quantities of data and ultra-sensitive infrared detectors to record extremely faint signals.



All this means Webb will see objects that are fainter and farther away and allow scientists to peer back to a time when galaxies were just forming.



The Webb Telescope is due to launch in 2018, with various components currently undergoing rigorous testing.

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