James Webb Space Telescope

I think we were supposed to write about a telescope. It may have been a couple weeks ago that we were supposed to do this, but hey, better late than never, right? I chose a telescope that doesn't exist yet, because what we don't have is always more exciting than what we do have.

So here's the telescope:

Or at least, what the telescope will look like. And also what the people working on it look like. It's called the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and should be the next big thing in space telescopes, after the Hubble Space Telescope is past its prime.

The JWST will be an infrared telescope with a 6.5 meter mirror, and will detect wavelengths between .6 and 28 micrometers.  Astronomers have high hopes that it will allow them to look even farther back (read: farther away) in the universe than we've ever seen before. It's also kind of neat in that it's actually an international collaboration (I suppose this makes sense, since we don't really have any boarders in space) between the US, Canada, and Europe (That would be NASA, CSA, and ESA, respectively).

There's a whole bunch of new technology going into this telescope, which you can read about here. I don't really want to get into all of it, but in short the design of the telescope and a lot of the pieces in it are completely new technologies. Hopefully they all work like they're supposed to!

The JWST is scheduled to launch in 2018 from French Guiana (which is on the northern-ish coast of South America). It will be orbiting about 1 million miles outside the orbit of the earth, so that it can block out any heat-noise from the earth, the sun, and the moon all at the same time.

References:
Image by NASA James Web Space Telescope - People
James Webb Space Telescope