The New Webb Telescope

[togor]

It's big, but is it big enough? It's amazing, but could it be even amazinger? We're going to need a bigger rocket if we want to see the baby born. And so, what does that achieve? I don't want to be the guy who questions NASA's good works, but If you've seen the horse head galaxy et.el. you've seen them all. At some point infinity rears up and someone has to say enough.

Well this one operates in the infrared, longer wavelengths than visible light.

That matters because the stuff far away is the "oldest" light, from the earlier moments of the universe, and it has the most Doppler shift on it, causing its light to be in the infrared. So yeah, to see closer to the beginning, they needed good infrared detection. And to get it, they had to put the thing a bit further away from earth, out at one of the nearby Lagrange points, and put a giant-ass heat shield on it so that the cold side stays cold. Infrared detectors need cold. True on a Javelin missile, true on a space telescope.

I suppose the money could have gone to buying scratch-offs, but at some level I do believe that all those poor immigrants who came to America a century ago and taxed themselves to build schools where there had been none, did that in part so that someday machines like this could fly.