James Webb Space Telescope "The Miracle of Science" | NASA JWST Project

James Webb Space Telescope "The Miracle of Science"

     In the cauldron of the early universe no light could escape the dense opaque fog of primordial gas, but as this cosmic soup of atomic particles began to cool down hydrogen atoms began to form, leading to the universe's first bright, violent new starts burning through the fog that once blocked all light from escaping the expanding universe.

Some of these early photons have traveled unhindered through the vast empty expanse of space for 13.5 billion years, and will reach their destination, here on the man-made detectors of the James Webb telescope.

I don’t think it’s very useful to speculate on what god might or might not be able to do, rather we should examine what he actually does with the universe we live in, all our observations suggest that it operates according to well defined laws. These laws may have been ordained by god, but it seems he does not intervene in the universe to break the laws, at least once he set the universe going.

A space odyssey coming to an end because of the curiosity of humans. The James Webb telescope is going to give us our first detailed glimpse of this early universe from which we and everything we know was born. The James Webb telescope is a 10 billion dollar endeavor.

An endeavor that has eaten into NASA’s limited budget, consuming one quarter of NASA’s entire astronomy budget for years, and in the early hours of a tenuous launch date of December 25th, this 10 billion dollar gamble will launch aboard the Ariane 5 rocket, a European heavy lift launch vehicle, from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana Astronomers, physicists, and enthusiasts alike will look on with nervous excitement as this rocket carries the next generation in human curiosity. This is the insane engineering of the James Webb Telescope.

The combination of technologies required to make the James Webb telescope possible are unique to this time period in human history.

The launch vehicle, the image processing, the electromechanical systems, the cooling systems, the mirror, and the sun shield. This endeavor is the culmination of not just the decades of work from the engineers and scientists at NASA, but thousands of years of work of our ancestors.

The materials and engineering required to peer back 13.5 billion years into the re-ionization epoch are a punctuation point in human history, that we, the human race, should be celebrating and watching with bated breath together.

The launch will take place here, in French Guiana, a space port ideally located on the Earth’s equator to give the James Webb Telescope an extra push towards its final destination.

Click here to Continue reading... [Part 2]