NASA is one large step closer to putting the James Webb Space Telescope into service. The agency has successfully deployed the JWST's signature gold-coated primary mirror, completing all major deployments for the instrument. The mission crew still has to align the telescope's optics by moving the primary mirror's segments (a months-long process), but it's a strong sign the $10 billion device is in good shape.

The JWST also requires a third course correction burn as it heads toward the L2 Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun. Astronomers will use the point to study infrared light without interference, potentially offering insights into the early Universe that aren't possible with Hubble and other equipment.

First images from the telescope won't be available until the summer, and it could take much longer before those images translate to meaningful discoveries. Even so, the deployment is an achievement. JWST represents the first time NASA has unpacked a complex observatory in space — it shows projects like this are viable, even if they're unlikely to be commonplace in the near future.

Stephen Hawking would've turned 80 on January 8th, 2022 had he still been alive. While he's no longer with us, his contribution to our understanding of the universe remains immense and shouldn't be forgotten. To pay tribute to the celebrated physicist and cosmologist on what would've been his 80th birthday, Google worked with his family to create a video Doodle that gives us a condensed version of his life. Moreover, the tech giant used Hawking's famous computer-generated voice to narrate his work and experiences from the time he graduated. 

Hawking was born in 1942 in Oxford, England and has always been fascinated with the universe. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease, when he was 21. In the years after that, he lost his mobility and his ability to speak, but he was able to communicate through a computer using a voice created in the 1980s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt. In the Doodle, you'll hear Hawking's voice talk about his work on black holes — one of the scientific works he's most known for is the Hawking radiation, which is the theory that black holes emit radiation. 

You'll also hear his voice say how he's free in his mind even though he cannot move. "I have spent my life traveling across the universe inside my mind," his voice narrates.

In a statement, his daughter Lucy and sons, Robert and Tim Hawking, said:

"We also believe he would have found it important to show that he never allowed the challenges of his physical condition to limit his power of expression nor his determination to make an impact on the world in which he lived. We hope that his example offers inspiration and hope globally to all who face great challenges at this difficult time. Our father would have been 80 years old today and we thank everyone who has joined in the celebration of his extraordinary life and the legacy he gave to us all."

You can watch the whole Doodle below.

Alexa will be the first voice assistant available beyond Earth. Amazon and Lockheed Martin have revealed NASA will carry Alexa to space aboard the Artemis I mission launching later in 2022. While that flight is uncrewed, the companies are planning a "virtual crew experience" at NASA's Johnson Space Center that will let people in Mission Control (including students and special guests) simulate conversations between the digital helper and astronauts.

This is decidedly more sophisticated than the Alexa on your Echo speaker. Alexa will have access to the Orion spacecraft's telemetry data, answer "thousands" of mission-related questions and even control devices like cabin lighting. Amazon has finessed its algorithms to consider Orion's acoustics. Connectivity in space shouldn't be an issue, either. The Callisto technology payload carrying Alexa will both allow local voice control (even with no internet access) and access the Deep Space Network to provide news from home.

The initiative isn't just about bragging rights or bringing a Star Trek-style computer to life. Amazon will use the lessons learned from Artemis I to improve Alexa both for future missions and for everyday users, particularly those who have little to no internet connectivity. The company is also adding new Alexa experiences that will give you access to Artemis I's telemetry, imagery, video (including the launch livestream) and notifications for key mission milestones.

Amazon is hoping to foster the next wave of space explorers in the process. It's introducing an Alexa for Astronauts program that provides access to the virtual crew experience, digital tours of the Johnson Space Center and a STEM curriculum built withe the help of the National Science Teaching Association and Mobile CSP. The move helps Amazon burnish its reputation, of course, but it could be worthwhile if it encourages more students to pursue space industry careers.

The United States is extending its operations aboard the International Space Station through 2030, NASA confirmed Friday in a blog post. “The International Space Station is a beacon of peaceful international scientific collaboration and for more than 20 years has returned enormous scientific, educational, and technological developments to benefit humanity," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. 

Though it was never in doubt that the US would continue its near-term commitment to the ISS, NASA's announcement comes amid heightened tensions with Russia, one of several nations sharing access to the Space Station. 2021 also saw Russia deepen its cooperation in space with China, another US adversary, as The New York Timesnoted in June.

Fall 2021 saw multiple emergencies aboard the ISS, both of which the US blamed on Russia. In October, surprise test fire from a docked Russian spacecraft caused the ISS to tilt out of its normal position, leading personnel on board to briefly evacuate. (A fun footnote: The spacecraft that caused the incident had been in space so that a Russian crew could film the first feature film aboard the Space Station.) Then, in November, satellite debris forced ISS astronauts to seek shelter on the day as a Russian missile attack. The US condemned Russia for the attack. Russia did not acknowledge any wrongdoing. 

Later that month, in an unrelated episode, Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, left the door open for possible criminal charges related to a 2018 incident involving a hole in one of its spacecraft, which Russian media insinuated could have been the result of US sabotage. "These attacks are false and lack any credibility," Nelson told Ars Technica in November.

In its statement on Friday, NASA highlighted among its continuing projects sending humans to Mars, as well as Project Artemis, an effort to send the first woman and the first person of color to the Moon. Indeed, NASA underwent a reorganization in September that seemed to specifically reflect its priorities around the Moon and Mars.

In 1881, archaeologists discovered the mummy of Amenhotep I in Deir el-Bahari, a village outside of Egypt's famous Valley of the Kings. For 140 years, scientists have been unwilling to unwrap the king’s body out of fear they’ll damage his ornate face mask and bandages. But thanks to computer tomography (CT) technology, they don’t have to take that risk anymore. Researchers at Cairo University recently digitally “unwrapped” Amenhotep to learn about his life and dynasty.

The scans revealed he was about 35 years old when he died. "Amenhotep I seems to have physically resembled his father: he had a narrow chin, a small narrow nose, curly hair, and mildly protruding upper teeth," Dr. Sahar Saleem, the lead author of the study, told PA Media. It’s not clear why he passed away at such a young age. Researchers found no evidence of external wounds or disfigurements that may have contributed to his death.

Sahar Saleem et al.

What they did discover were various post-mortem injuries that were likely inflicted on the body by grave robbers. That damage was “lovingly repaired” by mortuary priests of the 21st Dynasty some 400 years after Amenhotep’s death. They used a resin-treated linen band to reattach the head and neck together. Researchers also found some 30 amulets hidden among Amenhotep’s bandages. The fact they were still there even after his reburial likely disproves the long-held theory that priests of later dynasties would reuse the ornaments in the funeral rites of their pharaohs.

The study provides an insight into one of the most fascinating periods of Egyptian history. Amenhotep I ruled between 1525 and 1504 BCE, during Egypt’s New Kingdom period. He was among the first pharaohs of the 18th dynasty, a lineage that would later include Akhenaten, the controversial “heretic” pharaoh who introduced the kingdom to a monotheistic-like religion centered around the sun. He was also the father of Tutankhamun or King Tut. 

The first time archaeologists used a CT scan to examine a mummy was in 1977. As the technology has matured and become more accessible, it has allowed researchers to study mummies in ways they couldn’t before. In 2017, for instance, Chicago’s Field Museum was able to dive into its collection, one of the most extensive in the US, with the help of portable CT scanners.

Astronomers aren't the only ones taking issue with SpaceX's Starlink satellites. As CNETreports, China has filed a complaint with the United Nations over two reported near-collisions between the in-progress Tiangong space station and Starlink vehicles. According to Chinese officials, the station had to perform evasive maneuvers on July 1st and October 21st this year to minimize the chance of a collision.

The accusations line up with astronomer Jonathan McDowell's conjunction observations for both days. China further argued that SpaceX's satellites weren't always predictable. During the October incident, the Starlink craft was "continuously" manuvering in a way that made it difficult to predict the orbital path.

We've asked SpaceX for comment. China has already demanded action, however. In its complaint, the country asked the UN Secretary-General to remind countries (read: the US) that parties in the Outer Space Treaty are responsible for incidents beyond Earth, even if they involve private companies.

China has created its own share of incidents in the past. A 2007 anti-satellite missile test created debris that poses threats to the International Space Station and other spacecraft to this day. All the same, the complaint suggests the privatization of space is making these near-accidents more commonplace — particularly when SpaceX, Amazon and others are launching internet services that depend on huge satellite constellations.

At long last, NASA has launched the James Webb Space Telescope. On Christmas morning, the telescope launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket after 14 years of development and a number of delays.

The JSWT will orbit the Sun, close to the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system. It will take around a month to reach its destination, after which researchers will be able to peek into black holes, observe some of the oldest galaxies in the universe and evaluate the habitability of various exoplanets.

NASA partnered with the European and Canadian space agencies to develop the project. The JSWT has been beset by delays throughout its long history. NASA initially hoped to launch it in 2007, but spiraling costs prompted engineers to re-think the telescope in 2005. The JSWT was then declared ready in 2016, but the project was once again put on hold because of construction complications. The telescope was assembled in 2019, but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, leading to delays to testing and shipping.

After the JWST finally reached the spaceport, NASA set a launch date of December 18th. However, it delayed the launch until today due to last-minute inspections and a lack of favorable weather. Still, what's a few days for such an important, long-in-the-works mission? The JWST is finally spacebound, and in the coming months, we'll start to learn some of its discoveries.

After far too many delays over the years to count, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has a launch date. Provided there’s not another last-minute setback, the successor to Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to take flight on Saturday, December 25th.

NASA expects the Ariane 5 rocket carrying the JWST to lift off no earlier than 7:20AM ET on Christmas Day from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. You can watch the entire event unfold, beginning with pre-launch coverage, starting at 3AM ET. The space agency will broadcast the launch on its NASA Live website, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Twitch.

Understandably, there’s a lot of excitement for the JWST to finally make its way into space. Not only will a successful launch represent the end of a tumultuous 14-year development cycle, but the telescope, with its far more advanced sensors than Hubble, will afford astronomers to glimpse at black holes and early galaxies in a way they haven’t been able to do in the past.

For the past 31 years the Hubble Space Telescope has been an invaluably versatile observation platform for astronomers but it’s begun showing its age of late. Last serviced in 2009, the telescope has had to enter the partial-shutdown “safe mode” multiple times over the last few years — most recently, this October. And while optimistic estimates suggest that the Hubble could remain in operation through the end of the decade, NASA, with its ESA and CSA partners, have already spent more than a dozen years developing a successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). When the Webb launches — currently set for liftoff on Christmas Day — it will take over as humanity’s preeminent eye in the sky for decades to come.

The 7.2-ton JWST will be the largest telescope NASA has ever put into orbit. Its 6.5-meter primary mirror array — composed of 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments — is more than twice the size of the Hubble’s and nearly 60 times larger in area than the Spitzer Telescope, which retired in 2020. The sun shield it uses to protect its delicate infrared sensors is nearly as long as a tennis court, and the telescope apparatus as a whole stands three stories tall. The 458 gigabits of data collected daily will be first routed through NASA’s Deep Space Network, then transmitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which will collate and disseminate that information to the greater astronomy community.

When it reaches its orbital home at the L2 Lagrange point 930,000 miles from Earth, the JWST will begin its four-point mission: searching for light from the earliest post-Big Bang stars; studying the formation and development of galaxies, examining the evolution of stars and planetary systems; and seeking out the origins of life.

To do so, the Webb will take a different approach from the Hubble before it. While the Hubble looked at the universe in the visible and ultraviolet spectrums, the JWST will see in infrared, just as the Spitzer used to but with far greater resolution and clarity. Using this infrared is critical to the Webb’s mission as that wavelength can peer through clouds of interstellar gasses and dust to see otherwise obscured objects beyond.

NASA/Chris Gunn

The Webb’s camera suite is made up of four individual components: the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), and the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph/Fine Guidance Sensor (NIRISS/FGS). These instruments are actually so sensitive that they can detect their own heat radiation when they’re operating. To minimize these infrared emissions, three of the sensors are chilled to negative 388 degrees Fahrenheit (-233 degrees C). The especially sensitive MIRI is cooled even further to -448 degrees F (-266 degrees C) — that’s a mere 7 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.

Getting the MIRI that cold is no easy feat. After the JWST makes its way into orbit, the telescope will spend weeks slowly chilling the sensor to its optimal operating temperature using a helium-based refrigeration system.

“It’s relatively easy to cool something down to that temperature on Earth, typically for scientific or industrial applications,” said JPL cryocooler specialist Konstantin Penanen in a recent NASA blog post. “But those Earth-based systems are very bulky and energy inefficient. For a space observatory, we need a cooler that is physically compact, highly energy efficient, and it has to be highly reliable because we can’t go out and repair it. So those are the challenges we faced, and in that respect, I would say the MIRI cryocooler is certainly at the cutting edge.”

The extra effort that MIRI requires will be well worth it as ground-based infrared telescopes — especially those operating within the mid-infrared spectrum as MIRI is, are largely hampered by heat emissions from the devices themselves and the surrounding atmosphere.

“With the other three instruments, Webb observes wavelengths up to 5 microns. Adding wavelengths out to 28.5 microns with MIRI really increases its range of science,” George Rieke, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said earlier this month in a NASA blog. “This includes everything from studying protostars and their surrounding protoplanetary disks, the energy balance of exoplanets, mass loss from evolved stars, circumnuclear tori around the central black holes in active galactic nuclei, and a lot more.”

NASA

Given the JWST’s highly specific low temperature needs, keeping the telescope’s sensor suite out of direct sunlight (and blocked from other light sources like the Moon and Earth) is crucial. To ensure that those cameras are perpetually shaded, NASA engineers have built a five-layer sunshield made from aluminum-coated Kapton film to keep them in the cold, cold dark.

"The shape and design also direct heat out the sides, around the perimeter, between the layers," said James Cooper, the JWST’s Sunshield Manager at Goddard Space Flight Center. "Heat generated by the Spacecraft bus at the ‘core,’ or center, is forced out between the membrane layers so that it cannot heat up the optics."

Measuring 69.5 feet by 46.5 feet by .001 inches, the kite-shaped sun shield is stacked five layers high so that energy absorbed by the top layer radiates out into space between them, making each successive layer slightly cooler than the one above it. In fact, the temperature difference at the outermost (383K, or 230 degrees F) and innermost layers (36K, about -394 degrees F) is roughly an order of magnitude.

NASA

In order to collect enough light to view the fainest, most distant stars possible — some as far as 13 billion light years away — the JWST will rely on its massive 6.5m primary mirror array. Unlike the Hubble, which utilized a single 2.4m-wide mirror, the Webb’s mirror is divided into 18 individual segments, each weighing just 46 pounds thanks to their beryllium construction. They’re coated in gold to enhance their reflection of infrared light and hexagonal in shape so that, when fully assembled in orbit, they’ll fit together snugly enough to act as a single, symmetrical, gapless reflective plane. Their small size also allows them to easily be split up and folded down in order to fit within the tight confines of the Ariane 5 rocket they’ll ride into orbit.

ESA

The role of coordinating these segments to focus on a single spot in a distant galaxy falls to the mirrors’ actuator assembly. Seven small motors sit on the backside of each mirror segment (one at each corner and a seventh in the middle), enabling precise control of their orientation and curvature. "Aligning the primary mirror segments as though they are a single large mirror means each mirror is aligned to 1/10,000th the thickness of a human hair,” said Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager, Lee Feinberg.

After 20-plus years of development and delays, costing $10 billion and involving the efforts of more than 10,000 people, the Webb Telescope is finally ready for launch — and hopefully this time it’ll actually take. The program has seen delay, after delay, after delay to its launch schedule. NASA abandoned the initial date of March 2021 in the wake of the initial COVID-19 outbreak and its associated lockdowns — though, to be fair, the GAO in January 2020 had only given the JWST a 12 percent chance of getting off the ground by the end of this year — and set a vague “sometime in 2021” timetable for its launch.

NASA

NASA later revised that estimate to a firm “sometime in October 2021,” eventually settling on a Halloween launch window, only to delay it again to late November/early December. Of course, early December quickly became late December, specifically the 22nd, which was then nudged back once again to its current date of December 24th. Actually, make that the 25th.

These delays have been caused by the myriad factors that go into getting an instrument of this size and sensitivity ready for launch. After completing its construction, the JWST had to undergo an exhaustive battery of tests, then be gently loaded into a shipping container and transported to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. Once there, the actual task of prepping, fueling, and loading the JWST onto an Ariane 5 rocket took another 55 days.

That timeline was further extended due to an “incident” on November 9th wherein, “a sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band — which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter — caused a vibration throughout the observatory,” per NASA. The Webb’s anomaly review board initiated an additional round of testing to ensure that those vibrations didn’t damage other components or knock anything important out of alignment.

NASA

Now that the telescope has been deemed A-OK, final preparations are underway. Barring any more setbacks, the JWST will launch at 7:20 ET on Christmas Day (watch here live!) to begin its 30-day, 1.5 million kilometer-long journey out the Lagrange 2 where it will spend the net two weeks slowly unfurling its mirrors and sunshield, then begin exploring the depths of the early universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready for launch after 14 years in development. NASA cleared its launch readiness review and gave it the go-ahead for launch, which was supposed to take place on December 24th. Unfortunately, poor weather conditions have prompted the agency to delay its launch yet again. James Webb will be lifting off from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket with the new target date of December 25th and a launch window of between 7:20 AM and 7:52 AM Eastern time.

This is the closest the telescope has ever gotten to starting its month-long journey towards its destination. It's been delayed numerous times in the past due to one reason or another — NASA targeted an October launch date after its development was delayed by the pandemic, but it determined that the telescope wouldn't be ready until November or December. 

NASA (and its partners, the European and Canadian space agencies) then targeted a December 18th launch date, before pushing it back to December 22nd. The James Webb team needed the extra time to inspect the telescope and make sure nothing was damaged during an incident that happened at testing. Its launch was delayed to December 24th after that because of a communication issue between the telescope and its Ariane 5 launch vehicle. This time, NASA had already conducted a news conference confirming that the telescope is ready for launch before announcing the new target date.

After the James Webb telescope arrives in its orbit near the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system, researchers around the world will be able to use it to peer at some of the universe's earliest galaxies, look into black holes and assess exoplanets' habitability. NASA will confirm the new launch date this evening.