When Will Hubble Telescope’s Replacement Bring Us Photos from Space?

IT'S FINALLY IN PLACE AND READY FOR WORK

Just this past week, Hubble Telescopes' replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, is finally completely in place, in space, and ready to bring us even more amazing space images and information than our dear Hubble Telescope has done for as long as I can remember.

Am I the only one that's excited about this?  I find this absolutely incredible! I'm sort of obsessed with the possibility that it's actually finally been completed and everything worked once they had it in place.

SO WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?

The new telescope has a gigantic mirror that is a little bigger than 21 feet across and is made up of 18 hexagon-shaped mirror segments. The Hubble telescope, which delivered us so many amazing images from space, only had a mirror that was less than 8 feet across.  The segmented mirrors on the Webb, which sort of resembles Honeycombs cereal, have 6 actuators, which will allow scientists to move different parts of the mirror little by little, in a variety of ways, to help focus on objects far away. The technology wasn't available back when Hubble was sent into space.

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WILL WE LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO SEE RESULTS FROM WEBB?

I thought that maybe I wouldn't live long enough to see photos from this telescope, but boy was I wrong. NASA expects to have its very first photos from the Webb Telescope sometime In the first half of 2022 and says that we can expect to see those first photos in early summer.  Yes! There IS something positive and exciting that we can focus on! (No pun intended.)

Let's enjoy some of Hubble's greatest photos together, as we look forward to new findings and more amazing photos of the world around us that our own eyes never would allow us to see.