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Planned James Webb Telescope launch thrills central Illinois stargazers

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope
Alex Wong
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Getty Images
Technicians work on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope that will launch this month. Astronomers say the next big telescope should be designed to search signs of life on planets that orbit distant stars.

A Bloomington-Normal man is on pins and needles waiting for his best Christmas gift ever.

On Christmas Day, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch and travel a million miles beyond the earth. And Sandullah Epsicokhan says he can't wait.

Epsicokhan is a solar system ambassador. He works with the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena to tell the NASA story to clubs and schools in central Illinois. The Webb telescope will replace the aging Hubble Telescope in orbit. It has been under development for two decades, and Epsicokhan has been excited just about that long.

"What they're trying to do is really, really complicated. You're trying to send a telescope out ... it's going to be in a place where it's going to pick up some of the most minute, very sensitive levels of infrared light. And so you have to shade it from the sun. You have to shade it off from the Moon and the Earth to keep things cool. So you can detect these very, very, very faint infrared signatures way out in space," said Epsicokhan.

The launch is a big deal for every astronomer and stargazer. It is the successor to the Hubble telescope that revolutionized human understanding of the cosmos.

Epsicokhan said the Webb telescope will let scientists peer into the distant past, to find light emitted long ago.

"It can get us within 100 million years when the universe started. So that goes back to the Big Bang. We can see galaxies when they first formed, stars when they first formed, and get an idea what was going on. Also, it will allow us to look at things like the atmospheres of planets, so we can see if there's possibility of life forming on those planets. It is going to be a breakthrough like Hubble was," said Epsicokhan. "The main thing about infrared is that you can see through dust, and Hubble picks up dust, and the Webb telescope does have some infrared components on it, but not to the degree that we have with the James Webb."

If it works. It has 300 different pieces that could fail, and 107 pulleys on the various sun shields, said Epsicokhan. One of the infrared detectors has to be cooled down within seven degrees Kelvin.

Epsicokhan said he's confident it will work. He said scientists have tested every single part of the apparatus in harsh conditions.

"They had to duplicate the environment of space, just to test it out. You had to have a chamber large enough where you can take enough air out and get it cold enough. Sometimes building the things that you need to test things out is as tough as building the thing itself," said Epsicokhan.

He said it is one of the greatest engineering achievements of all time.

"For example, trying to get it to fit into the cowling of the Ariane rocket, that was tricky. It's got to survive going up into space with the vibrations of the rocket, taking it up there. And at the same time, when it gets there, it's got these very, very, very fine-tuned pieces of equipment that have to work. It had to be rugged, but it had to be very, very delicate at the same time," said Epsicokhan.

Even when it launches, astronomers and fans will have to wait as it goes beyond earth orbit.

"It's going to start unfolding. That it's going to take time, a couple of weeks for that. It's going to go out 1 million miles from Earth. There's no way to service it. So they had to build in all kinds of redundancies and ways to make sure that it's going to work and even when it gets out there it has to be fine-tuned. The telescope has to be aligned. We have to be patient even though we're excited about getting up there," said Epsicokhan.

The launch of the telescope by NASA and the European Space Agency has been put off multiple times over several years. And the latest delay is from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day, because of bad weather at the launch site in French Guiana.

WGLT Senior Reporter Charlie Schlenker has spent more than three award-winning decades in radio. He lives in Normal with his family.
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