I am not smart enough, but I wish I had a career in astronomy. Not only does it seem awesome and interesting, but it feels like laying the groundwork for humanity's long term future and that is an important and noble task.
Makes me feel silly when I stress about everyday things.
There are lots of noble and important tasks that could lay the groundwork for humanity's long term future that everyone can partake in right here on Earth! Climate-change mitigation, establishing UBI, etc. [/soapbox]
I am not smart enough, but I wish I had a career in astronomy. Not only does it seem awesome and interesting, but it feels like laying the groundwork for humanity's long term future and that is an important and noble task.
Makes me feel silly when I stress about everyday things.
If humanity actually does make it a few hundred more years I feel like people in our future will look back at mid 21st century as the golden years of wonder for science and space exploration. They'll be like "man, they had no idea they were about to truly start to discover and see how the universe looks and operates, imagine if you could be alive then to see it all start to be discovered?!".
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Oh, ya, I totally didn't need that arrow there. I would have found it myself.
I wonder how much money NASA wasted putting a giant arrow in space just to make it easier to find. They're so stupid. Should have checked their hypotenuses better.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
If humanity actually does make it a few hundred more years I feel like people in our future will look back at mid 21st century as the golden years of wonder for science and space exploration. They'll be like "man, they had no idea they were about to truly start to discover and see how the universe looks and operates, imagine if you could be alive then to see it all start to be discovered?!".
They added a cool 3D feature to the site, if you click solar system it shows clickable comets and asteroids in our solar system as well as a search feature on famous comets like Halley's and Hale-Bopp for extensive info and where they are and when they'll return.
This week, the three-month process of aligning the telescope began – and over the last day, Webb team members saw the first photons of starlight that traveled through the entire telescope and were detected by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. This milestone marks the first of many steps to capture images that are at first unfocused and use them to slowly fine-tune the telescope. This is the very beginning of the process, but so far the initial results match expectations and simulations.
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The process will take place in seven phases over the next three months, culminating in a fully aligned telescope ready for instrument commissioning
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The telescope commissioning process will take much longer than previous space telescopes because Webb’s primary mirror consists of 18 individual mirror segments that need to work together as a single high-precision optical surface.
Maybe I am easily impressed, but the heat shield really impresses me. It's crazy that something relatively thin and light has such a steep temperature gradient. I noticed that the cooling seems to have accelerated now too. It seemed to be stuck at around the -208C mark for a while, but dropped another 10C within the past few days.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
Maybe I am easily impressed, but the heat shield really impresses me. It's crazy that something relatively thin and light has such a steep temperature gradient. I noticed that the cooling seems to have accelerated now too. It seemed to be stuck at around the -208C mark for a while, but dropped another 10C within the past few days.
The Thermodynamics of it all is a little out of my wheelhouse, but I think the reason is that there is no medium to conduct heat in the vacuum conditions. So the shield just emits the radiation it absorbs back out in very very low wave lengths that aren't easily absorbed by something very big and very dense.
The Thermodynamics of it all is a little out of my wheelhouse, but I think the reason is that there is no medium to conduct heat in the vacuum conditions. So the shield just emits the radiation it absorbs back out in very very low wave lengths that aren't easily absorbed by something very big and very dense.
Yeah, the vacuum of space between the layers is a perfect insulator in terms of conduction and convection. And while the sunshield is designed to radiate some heat, its primary function is to reflect radiation away to avoid absorbing it in the first place.
Edit: the telescope also has a dedicated radiator to cool itself, but it's on the cold side of the telescope. If it were on the hot side, it would be absorbing heat instead.
