BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — The $10-billion telescope, that replaces and is a serious upgrade to the Hubbel Telescope, is set to be launched into space Christmas Morning.
When the James Webb Space Telescope is up and running, scientists say we’ll never look at the universe the same way.
“You're going to be opening up to us an understanding of what this universe is. What is our place in it? How did we come to where we are? Who are we? It's going to open up a whole new encyclopedia of information of who we are,” said Bill Nelson with NASA.
This is an internationally built telescope, locally Moog has been playing a big role in some of its components, like the cryogenic instrument actuators and components that assist with the telescope’s mirrors.
While the telescope will provide images in visible light, it will also capture images in infrared. That’s ideal for researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“That allows us to look at galaxies that are at high redshift where their light has been shifted toward the infrared part of the spectrum and see them in the same way that we would see galaxies nearby us with a telescope like Hubble,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe at the RIT School of Physics and Astronomy.
If all goes well, we could start to see images like this in 6 months. Launch time is at 7:20 Eastern, Christmas Morning.
