Beyond the Hubble telescope

[RussBLib]

Few things can inspire awe in me like astronomy. Saw this item on Daily Kos and thought it would be appreciated here.

Beyond the Hubble

Ask anyone to name a telescope and odds are one answer will come up every time: Hubble. Not as many know it was named after Edwin Hubble, the father of modern cosmology, who found the universe wasn't just far larger than we dared imagine, its very fabric was expanding in all directions at warp speeds every second of every day. Hubble the man expanded our appreciation of the universe and our place in it much the same way Hubble the telescope has blown our minds with thousands of images since.

For 25 years the Hubble Space Telescope has graced our textbooks and computer monitors with a seemingly endless procession of jaw-dropping beauty hidden far away, in tiny spaces—from our perspective. It stares at a hunk of sky the size of a dust grain once thought totally empty and finds hundreds of primeval galaxies, each an island universe, each one made of billions of stars. It glances briefly at a distant supernova remnant and we fall into infinitely recursive filaments and sheets of star-stuff. You could spend hours and hours scrolling through Hubble space porn and not see the half of it. Not a bad rebound for an instrument that first went up half-blind, needing corrective glasses.

Of course like all man-made devices, Hubble's days were always numbered. It is nearing the end of its operational life. There is a successor slated for launch as early as 2018. It's big, it's bad, it's even a little risky. But boy howdy, if it works as designed, we will all be the richer. James Webb Space Telescope.

James Webb Space Telescope.

The JWST is named after James Webb, an important NASA administrator during the space race heyday. Webb the telescope is the size of a tennis court and designed to provide far greater resolution than Hubble, at least 10 to 20 times better, and as much as 100 times or more as it comes completely online—never underestimate the ability of clever astronomers to tweak and tease out every last photon! But the tech upgrades don't stop there.

The rest is here.