Plans for best-ever telescope proceed

As the Hubble Space Telescope celebrates 25 years in space this week, NASA and its international partners are building an even more powerful tool to look deeper into the universe than ever before.

The James Webb Space Telescope will be 100 times more potent than Hubble, and will launch in 2018 on a mission to give astronomers an unprecedented glimpse at the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.

The telescope "will be able to see back to about 200 million years after the Big Bang", NASA said on its website.

It described the telescope as a "powerful time machine with infrared vision that will peer back over 13.5 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies forming out of the darkness of the early universe".

The project has drawn scrutiny from US lawmakers for its ballooning costs - now at about $8.8 billion, far higher than the initial estimate of $3.5 billion. But NASA has promised to keep the next-generation telescope on track for its October 2018 launch.

"What the Webb will really be doing is looking at the first galaxies of the universe," Webb telescope observatory project scientist Mark Clampin told AFP at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Inside a massive room that is partially closed off from view, a clean room where no dust can harm the telescope, a team of engineers dressed in white, resembling surgeons, work on building it.

The space telescope will weigh 6.4 metric tons. Its main mirror will be 6.5 meters in diameter, three times as large as Hubble's.

A joint project of NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies, the telescope will carry four instruments, including cameras and spectrometers that can capture extremely faint signals.

The telescope should further the search for life elsewhere in the universe by opening a new window on planets outside the solar system that might have water and orbit their stars at a suitable distance to prevent freezing or boiling.

(China Daily 04/23/2015 page10)