NASA
NASA has successfully installed the first of 18 flight mirrors onto the James Webb Space Telescope, beginning a critical piece of the observatory’s construction.
In the clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland this week, the engineering team used a robot arm to lift and lower the hexagonal-shaped segment that measures just over 4.2 feet (1.3 meters) across and weighs approximately 88 pounds (40 kilograms). After being pieced together, the 18 primary mirror segments will work together as one large 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) mirror. The full installation is expected to be complete early next year.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
Unfortunately for the James Webb Space Telescope, it falls into the latter category.
While telescopes in space can scan the sky without interference from Earth's clouds, they still run into problems from hazes on other planets. To get around foggy skies, researchers have simulated haze formation in exoplanet atmospheres in hopes of better understanding future observations made with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
The technology behind that telescope is just breathtaking. Would aliens consider us a peeping tom, though, staring at their planets like a kid looking through his binoculars in a tree?