NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the spiritual successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the most advanced space telescope ever built, will have to wait a little longer to get to orbit. After an assessment of remaining testing and integration work, NASA announced that it is pushing the targeted launch date for James Webb back from October 2018 to sometime between March and June 2019.

The space agency says the telescope launch is not being delayed due to any technical or hardware flaws, but because the spacecraft to carry the telescope—which consists of a spacecraft bus and sunshield—is taking longer to integrate than expected. These two major components are being assembled at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, where technicians have run into delays.

"Webb's spacecraft and sunshield are larger and more complex than most spacecraft," said Eric Smith, program director for James Webb. "The combination of some integration activities taking longer than initially planned, such as the installation of more than 100 sunshield membrane release devices, factoring in lessons learned from earlier testing, like longer time spans for vibration testing, has meant the integration and testing process is just taking longer. Considering the investment NASA has made, and the good performance to date, we want to proceed very systematically through these tests to be ready for a Spring 2019 launch."

The telescope itself, made up of 18 gold-plated beryllium mirror segments, is currently undergoing cryogenic testing in the massive Chamber A at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The telescope was tested in space-like conditions, with temperatures dipping below minus 250 degrees Celcius (-420 F), but now technicians are slowly raising the temperature in preparation to remove the telescope from Chamber A next month. It will then travel to Northrop Grumman's facilities in Redondo Beach for integration with the spacecraft bus and sunshield.

The shiny gold telescope's primary mirror stretches 6.5 meters in diameter, giving it over five times the collecting area of Hubble. James Webb should be able to detect objects up to 16 times fainter than Hubble, and its ability to collect infrared light will allow astronomers to peer back in space and time further than ever before. The scope is also going to be used to study exoplanets outside our solar system as well as the watery moons that orbit Jupiter and Saturn.

The European Space Agency (ESA) will launch James Webb on an Ariane 5 rocket. The Europeans have been notified of the delay, and we can only wish NASA and Northrop a speedy integration process as we wait for the next great observatory in the sky and the riches it will bring.

Source: NASA

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