New space telescopes set to push the boundaries even further

A piece written for the good people at Red Shark on the back of interest in the James Webb Space Telescope. What comes next? The plans stretch out to 2040 and beyond…

Snippet:

All being well, the James Webb Space Telescope will finally be lifted up into orbit by a European Space Agency Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on December 22. From there it will unfurl its fearsomely complex solar array and start the month-long 1.5 million kilometre voyage to its eventual orbital station at the L2 point way out beyond the Moon (in many respects Webb is in fact as much a spacecraft as it is a telescope).

While it boots up slowly, it will be around six months from start to finish until we know if all is well, and there are an estimated 344 single point failures along the way that could scupper the mission. This is technically known as one hell of a risk profile. So, anyone interested in astronomy can while away the time looking at the specs for the next in the line of NASA’s Great Observatories, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Named after Nancy Roman, the pioneering first female executive at NASA who served as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Roman Space Telescope is a next-generation observatory designed to survey the infrared universe. With an enormous field of view and fast survey speeds, the NASA blurb about it says rather breathlessly that astronomers will be able to observe “planets by the thousands, galaxies by the millions, and stars by the billions.”

Full thing there: New space telescopes set to push the boundaries even further