I had made a New Years Resolution to return to diary writing, but I didn’t get more than two diaries in before I contracted COVID. I am COVID positive.
Our whole family is fully vaccinated, and the adults have their booster shots. But a group of children at our public school contracted COVID from within their church. Instead of informing the school district, they communicated within their church group, and just quietly pulled their own kids out of school.
I am thankful for the vaccine. COVID has presented mildly, as a mild cold. Spread within the family was slow. We can thank the vaccine for this, and despite Republican best efforts, the mass vaccination of the United States is proof that government can work.
When confronted with their decision to inform their own in group but not the public school, we were met with bewilderment and misunderstanding. Explaining concern and a duty for others was as foreign a concept as a Lagrange point to a Neanderthal. Which brings me to our next topic.
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Don’t look now, but the $10 Billion James Webb telescope is fully deployed.
In order to reach this point, the James Webb telescope had to successfully navigate 344 single point failuires in series; a failure of any would render the telescope inoperable.
And unlike the Hubble Telescope, the James Webb telescope isn’t servicable. The Hubble Telescope resides in low earth orbit, because it is primarily an optical telescope, capable of capturing images in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. James Webb needs to see more in the infrared, although it can see in the visible spectrum as far as about orange. And because James Webb needs to see in the infrared, it needs to be kept cold. From Wikipedia, “the telescope must be kept below 50 K (−223°C; −370°F) to observe faint signals in the infrared without interference from any other sources of warmth.” Infrared energy heats matter up. So if in near earth orbit like Hubble, the warmth from Earth, the sun, and even reflected from the moon, would warm the mirrors up, thereby blinding the instrument. Oh, and our atmosphere adsorbs a lot of infrared electromagnetic radiation, which thankfully keeps us nice and warm, but also renders ground based infrared telescopes useless.
So James Webb will be be deployed in space near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, a void in space about 1,500,000 km (930,000 mi) from Earth (about 1% the distance from the Earth to the Sun), where its 5 layer kite-shaped sunshield can protect it from warming by the Sun, Earth and Moon at the same time. The telescope could really be anywhere far from the Earth, but LaGrange points allow spacecraft to stay put in these points with a minimum exertion of energy. The nice thing about the L2 Lagrange point is that it is farther from the Earth than the sun, and from the perspective here on Earth, the James Webb telescope will always be in the same place; the telescope will complete one orbit in the same 365.256 days that it takes the Earth, despite being farther away from the Sun than the Earth. I have a Ph.D. and I don’t fully understand it.
James Webb needs to see in the infrared because light emitted from the furthest reaches of the Universe, in the visible spectrum, has been shifted redder, past red, and into the infrared portion of the spectrum, by the expanding Universe.
James Webb has a primary mirror of 6.5m. Hubble, which has given us astonishing images now in its fourth decade, has a primary mirror of only 2.4m. So get ready for some amazing images in about 6 months time.
But this hasn’t been the only amazing scientific mission of the Biden Administration. NASA landed a rover the size of a car on Mars from a flying sky crane, and captured the whole thing on video. Oh, and there was a helicopter too.
And then we have NASA’s BFR, with its future 8m payload diameter, scheduled to launch some time this spring on a test flight around the moon.
What can fit in an 8m diameter payload? Well, lots of things, including Hubble’s successor: LUVOIR. If you think Hubble captured magnificent images with a 2.4m mirror, imagine what we can see with a 15m diameter mirror.
Back on Earth, Republican opposition to fighting COVID is show that government can’t. If government can, then they are a potential solution. And our Republican’s can’t have that. So it’s good to discuss the amazing ways our government is succeeding.