We’ve all seen science fiction movies about a machine that could allow us to go back to the past and future. We know that this is not possible in real life. Now what if some government agencies come up with a machine made out of gold and tell us that it is indeed real? Would you believe it? If it helps, then what if one of those agencies is NASA? Even though we don't believe in whatsapp forwards, we Indians have a tendency to believe everything if you add a Quote mark saying “Confirmed by Nasa”.
NASA, ESA and CSA have been working on this mega telescope for over 10 years, having spent 10 billion dollars on this project to show us the past by technologies from the future. The James Webb Space Telescope or JWST,is going to be a major breakthrough in astronomy allowing our scientists to see how stars and such were formed after the big bang.
So how does this big radar work in a nutshell? It captures Infrared light which cannot be seen by a normal telescope, using it’s large 18 hexagon shaped mirror segments made from pure gold since it reflects light the most. The main goal of this telescope is to provide a higher resolution image of Infrared light, so the mirrors have to precisely filter out light it catches, so it can process only the stuff the astronomers want. Now catching light takes a lot of hours, so the astronomers can’t just sit around waiting for one single thing to load. To fix this, they have put on some advanced technology that allows the Telescope to focus on multiple objects at the same time. Infrared light is advanced science, so to sum up a small part that is important, Infrared light is generated by people, animals, machines etc. So you can say it’s generated by energy. Being able to see this light, makes you able to see a large part of the universe. Night light goggles that are used by the military, also use this technology to highlight humans. Now the thing with the JWST is that it also happens to be a machine which generates infrared lights, so the light generated by the JWST itself will mess up the imagery. The solution for this problem that our engineers came up with is to keep this thing in temperature below 50 Kelvins or -223 degrees celsius. Now this is quite easy in space since it's really cold out there. The real problem appears when a hot object like the sun is nearby. To protect it from the sun, there is a highly advanced 5 layered Sunshield Protection fitted onto it with each layer thinner than a strand of human hair.
That’s basically how it works. The real question is, how does this telescope time travel? How this works is that we can only see when light reaches us and light takes a lot of years to travel from space to the earth. So when we get an image from a planet 500 million light years away, then we see it’s past 500 million years ago. So theoretically, if we go to a place 100 million light years ago and put in a really powerful telescope, then we will be able to see earth from a 100 million years ago and see the past. But this machine isn’t just bound to a 100 million years ago, It can get us footage from 3.8 billion years ago when the big bang took place. This will allow us to study a lot of stuff that is inaccessible to us now.
The JWST was deployed on 24th December 2021. you’d think that such a huge project would get a lot of attention from mainstream media everywhere, but it just wasn’t the case. It was kind of shameful to see the Indian media not broadcasting this huge advancement in astronomy and sciences. Due to the lack of media coverage, this might not seem like a big thing, but it is actually huge in the world of science. This is a crazy advancement in astronomy since a large part of the universe and information was unreachable to us.
It has been less than a hundred years since the first satellite was released into space, when space exploration actually started, when we reached the moon, Mars, got satellite systems all over the globe, built this telescope and is not far away from building the first space colony all in the span of a hundred years.
It isn’t all flowers and sunshine however. Nasa expects more than 300 errors that can happen which may ruin all the progress and if that happens, then the 10 billion dollars that were put into this, will go to waste. People don’t understand the value of 10 billion dollars. So to put it into perspective, 10 billion dollars is almost equivalent to the entire GDPs of Tajikistan and Bhutan combined.
This brings in the question that, should we be spending so much money for the sake of development when there are literally so many people starving at home? This basically brings forth the Rich and Poor divide, with space tourism on its way to be available to the wealthy while the poor don’t even have access to electricity.
Whether it is good or not, we know that space technology will change our lives forever and it is even necessary in a sense. If a catastrophic disaster like a meteor or a massive tsunami were to occur, then the entire human species would perish and go extinct. But, if we manage to settle even one colony in space, then our fate isn’t sealed. Another thing is that the JWST will help us a lot with finding planets similar to ours, that can support life since this has been a very major ambition of ours for a long time.
To conclude this article, I would like to say that if everything goes right for the JWST, then we will be one step closer to space exploration.
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