James Webb Space Telescope

 

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.

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.