Review: James Webb Space Telescope: Origins, design and mission objectives

Article from livescience.com

Written by Andrew May, July 30th, 2022

This article gives a detailed explanation of what the JWST is, and why it’s significant. Essentially, the JWST is called The James Webb Space Telescope, and it was launched 8 months ago, on December 25th, 2021. The main purpose of this hyper-advanced telescope device is to help us observe even more galaxies and find out more about the mysteries of the universe. There are four objectives: find out about the early universe, take photos of galaxies so that we can study their properties, help us find evidence about the lifecycles of stars, and look for exoplanets and hopefully discover the required building blocks for life in other solar systems.

As evident from the information given in this article, this is extremely important in the “space industry”, because the telescope can open to us a new age of advancements and discoveries. So how was this designed, and what makes it special compared with other devices? NASA has been cautious to express that “Webb isn’t simply a bigger and more powerful telescope than Hubble”, and the Hubble was already considered one of the major constructions of the 21st century, with it taking hundreds of photos emphasizing the universe around us. Still keeping the best parts of the technology used to create the Hubble, the Webb was created with more than two and a half times the diameter, and hundreds of times the sensitivity.

Currently, the Webb telescope would be located somewhere around the L2 point, which is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Not only will this allow us to view galaxies millions of miles away, but it will also give us a much clearer view of what is around us currently viewable on Earth. Through the photos that were publicized on July 11st on the official website for the Webb telescope, we can see many exotic galaxies that had amazing properties.

For instance, a cluster of galaxies named SMACS 0723, about 4.6 billion light-years from Earth, was so massive that it bends and magnifies the light of other galaxies located around it. This is called gravitational lensing, and everything around the supercluster of galaxies is warped and folded. But how does the telescope function? How does it transmit the photos back to Earth, being millions of miles away? The article also gives a detailed description of this. Just like a traditional telescope, it has glass and other special material around the receiving end, which focuses the light received and pieces them together to form an image.

Overall, this article is very well written. All the critical information is included, and everything is given a detailed explanation of why it’s there, and just answering the questions in a long but still concise way. For instance, the questions that it answered ranged from the images of the Webb, to how the telescope works, and why each specific part was made that way.

One part that was well created was the organization, and on the website, we can actually see that the subtitles are included for every couple of paragraphs or so, proving that everything is supposed to be there, and it’s just very beautifully created. Another excellent part was the style of writing; as we all know, articles are usually formal, because they’re supposed to be informative. This was also the case here, but it also added hints of language that made it more interesting, by putting extra stories and information in there, removing the tiresome aspects of reading a long text.

In conclusion, I found this article extremely intriguing, and I would say that it illustrated this topic perfectly, explaining everything ranging from the individual parts of the telescope to a special Q & A with the Main project scientist at NASA. The organization and style of writing were also controlled and maintained intricately, proving that the quality of this article is just top-notch.