NASA's James Webb space telescope (JWST) that took almost 30 years to build from scratch, launched on this Christmas Day. The telescope has been making headlines for several years prior to its launch. Let's take a look at its mission.
The telescope is dubbed as the successor of the legendary Hubble Space Telescope that has been serving humankind for the last thirty-one years. Just like it, JWST will help us search for distant stars and galaxies. In all, JWST has four key goals.
The first one is to search for light from stars and galaxies that were formed in the universe just after the Big Bang. The second key goal for JWST is to study the formation and evolution of galaxies up to now. The next goal is to enhance our understanding of the formation of stars and planetary systems. The last and probably the most important goal is to study the origins of life and measure the physical and chemical properties of planetary systems.
The duration of the mission would be 5-10 years. It is equipped with a Near Infrared Camera, Near-Infrared Spectrograph, Mid Infrared Instrument, Fine Guidance Sensors/ Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph. It differs from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) as it will observe only in near-infrared light. HST, on the other hand, observes in the visible part of the spectrum.
Scientists will get the observation time through General Observers (GO) Program that will provide all astronomers to apply for the observing time. The Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) program will guarantee observing time for all the scientists who developed the software and hardware of JWST. And, the Director's Discretionary Early Release Science (DD-ERS) program is for the observations made during the first five months of the operation and immediately released to the community,
It is just the beginning of a long and adventurous journey for us as we dig deeper into space. Let's see how it turns out for us.
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