After an extended wait of 25 years,
several budget overruns, and unprecedented delays,James Webb Space Telescope
was finally launched. a ten billion
dollar machine working
in its full swing can make anyone ecstatic and also the fact that it'll collaborate with the Event horizon telescopes within the future to capture the primary image of the Milky Way's part, Sagittarius A* (A star), makes it even more exciting. But when is Webb visiting return its first image of the cosmos? what's the primary thing it
will focus on? And most
significantly, what are its long-term plans? The first few months are going to be intense. Firstly, getting a telescope so big to
its final destination could be a big task in itself.
Webb will orbit the Sun near L2, a
gravitational stablility solar orbit
that's roughly 1 million miles from
Earth on the alternative side
of our planet from the sun. Secondly, we
are talking about a telescope
with a primary mirror composed of 18
hexagonal mirror segments,
and unfolding the mirror into one big unit is another feat to accomplish.
So to be precise, within the first month, the James Webb Space Telescope will
undergo several maneuvers and course
corrections to attain its final orbit round the L2 point.
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| image credit: science news for students |
In the second month, the alignment of mirror
segments will begin. It will possibly take 60 to 90 days after launch for the first mirror segments to align to work together as one optical surface. Then, perhaps, by the end of the third month, Webb
will be ready to take the
primary science-quality images, and by this point, it'll also
complete its journey to its L2 orbit
position. At this moment, it'd only
be taking blurred and casual images, possibly
of some bright stars, only for the
sake of optimization. so the next
few months will go into calibrating and
optimizing its cameras and other instruments. and at last, after six months of
its launch, Webb are in a very position to start its most awaited science
missions, and the year of Cycle 1 of a
series of spectacular observations will begin.Webb's cycle 1 observations
include everything from trying to
find atmospheres on nearby rocky exoplanets to probing the universe's earliest galaxies. Since Webb could bea telescope for all,
to be a component of its Cycle 1 observations, over 1200 proposals were
received.
From these, the panel underwent a double-blind
process and selected 266 final proposals from
scientists in 41 countries, amongst which women will lead a 3rd of them. All these proposals are collectively given a view time of 6000 hours, and all of
those come under the category of General observer or GO
programs. but this,
460 hours are going to be dedicated
to Early Release Science programs designed to place the telescope's instruments through their paces. Finally,
nearly 4,000 hours are going to be dedicated
to Guaranteed Time Observations or the GTO
programs awarded explicitly to scientists who
helped build the telescope's hardware and software. . But such a schedule
has been intentionally made in order that Webb isn't left idle from observing
the cosmos.
Moreover, the overall observation time within Cycle 1's GO programs is
split among various subcategories. These
include 32% for galaxies, 23% for exoplanets, 12% for stellar astrophysics,
down to 6 June 1944 dedicated to our scheme. Further, there'll be
small programs consuming 25 hours or less
of observation time, medium programs requiring between 25 to 75 hours, and large programs requiring over 75 hours of the observation
window. Now coming to any or all the GO
programs, the most time
of 208.6 hours has been given to the COSMOS-Webb
proposal. In this, Webb will observe thousands
of the earliest galaxies formed within a billion
years of the massive bang.
These galaxies are so faint that observing them has always been out of range of the prevailing telescopes. But Webb is capable of staring at much fainter things.
So it's expected
to reveal a bag filled with information
about the universe's history,especially a few period from 400,000 to 1 billion years after the large bang, where the primary stars and galaxies
emerged. Coming to its next big project, about 141.7 hours of observations are dedicated to studying the atmospheres of a dozen
exoplanets in an exceedingly never
seen before manner. The James Webb Space
Telescope will employ its giant mirror to look at these worlds transit
their host stars and block the starlight while passing before of them.
This will allow the researchers to figure out the basic
composition and structure of any atmosphere present there. Most of
those target worlds include super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. However, the
foremost exciting planetary target are going to be TRAPPIST-1, a transiting planetary system about 40 light-years from Earth. This system is believed to comprise seven Earth-sized worlds
orbiting one star and is one among the
prime targets of Webb. Webb will have a complete of 5 programs solely dedicated to the observations of TRAPPIST-1. TRAPPIST-1c,
which is that the system's
second innermost world, is thought to be
too hot to support life. So Webb will assess the temperature of TRAPPIST-1c
to look for an environment on it planet.
It will observe this planet for nearly 18 hours.
The planetary observations don't end here. aside from studying foreign
worlds,Webb will undertake extensive studies about our scheme. for instance, Webb will study 59 trans-Neptunian objects, which are the icy bodies lying beyond the orbit
of Neptune. And this observation campaign
will last nearly 100 hours. additionally to the current,
Webb hopes to watch an interstellar object passing through our system, just like Oumuamua in 2017 or Comet Borisov in 2019. However, these programs are just for Webb's cycle 1 of
observations. In the long run, it will also carry out some tricky
missions. And one of the trickiest ones would be to image our
galaxy's black hole with the event horizon telescope. The
observations of dark matter and the birth of stars are also on the
list.
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