The first year of the Hubble successor
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) succeeds the Hubble Space Telescope. The spectral range shifts to longer wavelengths in the infrared. The JWST is scheduled to start next fall, on October 31, 2021. Now the observations of the first year have been selected from more than 1000 scientific proposals.
The flagship project of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is several years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, making it a frequent target been full of jokes and scathing criticism. But many would argue that these delays and budget worries are merely a reflection of the unprecedented scale and high level of ambition associated with this project. When it launches, hopefully on October 31st, it will be by far the largest and most sophisticated observatory ever sent into space. The JWST aims to revolutionize our understanding of the Universe from its high altitude site some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth - beyond the Moon's orbit. But what will the telescope actually accomplish to justify the decades of effort and expense to complete it?
