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Re: Mirror on the Cosmos: NASA's Next Big Telescope Takes Shape

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Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mirror on the Cosmos: NASA's Next Big Telescope Takes Shape
>> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mirror-on-the-cosmos-nasa-s-next-big-telescope-takes-shape/
> 
> 
>> Turned skyward and concave in a supportive cobweb of carbon fiber
>> called a backplane, the mirror looks like the giant, unblinking
>> compound eye of an insect. For Alan Dressler, a senior astronomer at
>> the Carnegie Institute for Science, Webb?s completed mirror brings
>> other anatomies to mind. ?The mirror is the heart of a telescope,? he
>> says. ?To finish Webb?s mirror is to hear the first heartbeat of the
>> magnificent creature that will carry us to when the universe that
>> bore us was itself born.?
>>
>> That may sound overly dramatic, but, then again, the universe is a
>> dramatic place, and Dressler has been waiting for this moment for
>> more than twenty years. In the early 1990s, after the launch of
>> NASA?s Hubble Space Telescope, he chaired an influential committee
>> that recommended the agency?s next great observatory should do
>> something Hubble could not?stare back all the way to nearly the
>> beginning of time, to ?first light,? an era more than 13 billion
>> years ago when stars and galaxies first coalesced and ended the
>> primordial dark ages of the cosmos. Witnessing that first light,
>> astronomers could then retrace the universe?s evolution in
>> unprecedented detail, watching the assembly and growth of galaxies,
>> the emergence of subsequent generations of stars and the births of
>> planetary systems. Now, finally, the Webb telescope is poised to do
>> just that.
 
Big fucking whoopde do; astronomy news to a physics group.


-- 
Jim Pennino

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Mirror on the Cosmos: NASA's Next Big Telescope Takes Shape Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2016-02-04 13:10 -0600
  Re: Mirror on the Cosmos: NASA's Next Big Telescope Takes Shape jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com - 2016-02-04 19:19 +0000
  Re: Mirror on the Cosmos: NASA's Next Big Telescope Takes Shape shan <shan@enterapps.org> - 2016-02-04 20:41 +0000

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