![]() Of gold to help it see better in the infrared. Light from distant objectsīounces off its hexagonal mirrors, which are coated with a thin layer Once JWST arrived at L2 with its instruments and equipment deployed, the fun began. Keep the Sun, Earth, and Moon at its back while it observes the cosmos. There, the SunĪnd Earth’s gravity balance out in a way that allows JWST to permanently Therefore JWST is located at a special spotĬalled L2, 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) away. Although JWST’s sunshield isn’t used for propulsion, the Sun’s rays will still give it a push, so the spacecraft has a reflective trim tab that deploys at a different angle to help offset the forces of solar radiation.īut even a sunshield's not enough: JWST also needs to block out lightįrom Earth and the Moon, which is difficult in Earth orbit. Looks a little like the solar sail aboard The Planetary Society’s LightSail spacecraft. The first line of defense is aįive-layer sunshield, which will keep the telescope chilled to -233ĭegrees Celsius (-388 degrees Fahrenheit). In order to see infrared light, JWST must block out heat from both The Canadian Space Agency also provided one instrument. In addition to providing the Ariane 5 rocket, the European Space Agency contributed to two of JWST’s four science instruments. ![]() An early target for JWST will be TRAPPIST-1, a star system 40 light-years away that contains multiple planets in the habitable zone, the not-too-hot, not-too-cold region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface. Nitrogen and oxygen, with trace amounts of gases associated with life An Earth-like planet would have an atmosphere made primarily of Imagined, but it makes sense to start by looking for worlds like our What are we lookingįor? Life on other worlds may be more exotic than anything we’ve ever These changes show up particularly well in the infrared, which isĮxactly the kind of light JWST is equipped to see. Interactions between the starlight and exoplanet’s atmosphere. Not only does the amount of light change, the type changes too, due to Which creates a small dip in the amount of starlight we see from Earth. One of the ways we study exoplanets is by watching them pass in front of their host stars, Do any of these worlds host life as we know it? JWST will take us another step closer to finding out. ![]() So far, we know of more than 4,000 exoplanets - planets orbiting stars. It complements and extends Hubble’s observations, becoming the world’s newest premiere space observatory. JWST is able to see a much larger portion of the infrared spectrum than Hubble, and collects six times more light. Infrared-capable space telescopes can determine the atmospheric composition of planets orbiting other stars, look through clouds of dust and gas to see newborn stars, and even peer back through time to see galaxies that formed right after the Big Bang! The observatory builds upon three decades of discoveries by the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990 and has revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos.Įarth’s atmosphere distorts our view of distant celestial objects and blocks certain wavelengths of light, including slices of infrared that human eyes cannot see. Science is all about standing on the shoulders of giants, and that’s certainly the case for JWST.
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