Article Abstracts | August 2007
The complete article appears in the August 2007 issue of Photonics Spectra. If you do not have a copy of this issue,
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Building a Telescope to Supplant Hubble
Designing an observatory that will travel a million miles from Earth to study the first light requires a special class of photonic instruments.
by Hank Hogan, Contributing Editor
In 2013, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch. Three months later, it will settle into a spot about 1 million miles from Earth, from which it will record light from nearly the beginning of time and from the edge of space. By collecting photons in the dark at cryogenic temperatures, the instrument might answer questions about how the universe came to be and how life originated.
To accomplish these goals, 10 enabling technologies first had to be developed. Although the telescope has yet to fly, those technologies recently passed important tests, proving that they are operational under conditions simulating the telescope’s space environment, according to John E. Decker, deputy associate director of the telescope project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “[The technologies] reached a certain level of maturity as codified within the NASA guidelines. We made that milestone...”
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