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The most anticipated new joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is scheduled to be launching on October 31, 2021 (O'Callaghan 2021). After its final tests, the telescope will be transported to French Guiana, where it will be loaded onto a European Ariane 5 rocket and launched at about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, beyond the orbit of the moon.
JWST will be replacing the Hubble Space Telescope and once launched, it will become the largest and most high-level observatory ever sent into space. It consists of a 6.5-meter-wide mirror, gold-coated and in honeycomb shape, that has six times the light-gathering power of the Hubble Space Telescope. Its enormous sunshield base measures to 22 m by 12 m, about the size of a tennis court (Ling 2021). The mirror will be able to collect the infrared light of distant objects, shifted by the universe’s expansion. It will be sensitive enough to examine the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets for signs of life and gather the light of the universe’s first stars and galaxies (O'Callaghan 2021).
The plan for the first year of the operation of the James Webb Space Telescope has been released. “This is a really big deal,” says Kenneth Sembach, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, which will run and operate JWST. “The chance to be among the first accepted proposals in a brand-new observatory that has the potential to really revolutionize astronomy is something the community has been waiting for a long time. These are pathfinders, the kinds of science proposals that are going to blaze the way forward for the observatory in the future.” A total of 266 research projects from scientists in 41 countries were selected for the 6,000 hours observation time in the first year. A third of these projects will be led by women, about a third are from ESA member states, and 2 percent are from Canada, with most proposals, coming from American scientists (O'Callaghan 2021).
The James Webb Space Telescope is named after James Edwin Webb, the second administrator of NASA, who is best known for leading the Apollo space programme that first sent humans to the Moon.
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