Light diffraction in real life11/12/2023 ![]() first deployed, through this long, iterative process of looking at bright stars, we got all of those mirrors to work together like a chorus-where, at the beginning, everybody’s in their own key, their own song, their own genre, doing their own thing. You just move them until they’re in the right places. There are eighteen primary mirror segments-those beautiful gold hexagons-and the idea is that you design them to be correctable in space. For J.W.S.T., we launched mirrors that were able to fix themselves. early on, given its very complicated deployment?īecause of the way it worked, when Hubble went up in space, the optics had to be perfect. Were there any such problems with J.W.S.T. Engineers had to build the equivalent of eyeglasses for it. ![]() When the Hubble Space Telescope launched, we soon learned its images were blurry. Our conversation has been edited and condensed. I asked her about the telescope’s peculiar design, the ways that astronomy shapes our everyday lives, and the gaps in human knowledge which the Webb has already started to fill in. She is an animated storyteller, often punctuating her points with hand gestures and minor adjustments to her black horn-rimmed glasses. We spoke via video chat during her lunch break while I asked her questions, she jabbed a fork into a Tupperware that she had brought from home, and then chewed thoughtfully as she considered her answers. Rigby works at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, and has been part of the James Webb Space Telescope team since 2010, as an astrophysicist and, since June, as the J.W.S.T.’s senior project scientist. When astronomers point its mirror toward the edges of space, it sees the universe as it was thirteen billion years ago-close to the literal dawn of time. ![]() (Light falls on a spectrum from longer wavelengths to shorter wavelengths: infrared, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, ultraviolet.) It was designed, in part, to gather light that has been travelling to Earth since shortly after the big bang. It is a hundred times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope and sees infrared light that is invisible to the human eye. The Webb represents a culmination of this progression. Over the centuries, telescopes have grown and improved enough to spot increasingly faint and faraway celestial objects. Six decades later, Isaac Newton completed the first successful reflecting telescope, using a concave mirror that concentrated light much more efficiently. Galileo Galilei discovered Jupiter’s moons, and thus showed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, with a telescope that could magnify twenty times. The first telescopes were made of two pieces of rounded glass in a tube. “Where we had ignorance, we now have beautiful data.” Recently, in celebration of the telescope’s first year of science operations, the Webb team published an anniversary image of stars being born in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the stellar nursery closest to Earth. “There were predictions, but this was terra incognita, past the cliff of what Hubble could do, and expectations were all over the map,” Rigby told me. About a year after the telescope released its first images, Jane Rigby, the top NASA scientist working on the project, told me that it has “performed not only better than requirements but better than we could have possibly dreamed.” Recently, the Webb helped to show that galaxies in the first billion years of the universe were more active than previously thought, forming lots of stars in big bursts. Scientists then spent more than three months aligning its mirrors with nanometre precision. ![]() unfolded like a piece of origami, releasing an array of solar panels, a powerful antenna, a honeycomb of golden mirrors, and a sunshield that looks like a set of silver sails. Since the European Space Agency launched NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana, on Christmas Day, 2021, the telescope has hovered in space about a million miles from Earth. ![]()
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