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NASA will not rename its highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope, according to the media.
The nickname honors NASA’s second administrator, who ran the agency from 1961 to 1968 while working to land people on the moon. Critics of Webb claim he was complicit in discriminating against gay and lesbian NASA employees during his tenure, pointing to incidents such as the 1963 “immoral conduct” dismissal of Clifford Norton.
Some of these critiques created a online petition urging NASA to rename the nearly $ 10 billion telescope, which is scheduled to launch on December 18. The petition exposes the case against Webb, which its creators claim dates back to his pre-NASA days.
Related: Construction of the James Webb Space Telescope (photos)
Prior to becoming NASA chief, “Webb served as Under Secretary of State during the government service gay purge known as“ Lavender Scare. ”Archived evidence clearly indicates Webb was in high-profile conversations. level regarding the creation of this policy and the resulting actions, “the petition states.” As we noted earlier, Webb’s legacy of leadership is complicated at best, and complicit in persecution at worst.
Putting Webb’s name on such a high-profile mission – NASA touted the observatory as the successor to its iconic The Hubble Space Telescope – sends a disturbing message about the agency’s commitment to inclusion and diversity, say the creators of the petition.
“We, the future users of NASA’s Next-Generation Space Telescope and those who will inherit its legacy, demand that this telescope be given a name worthy of its remarkable discoveries, a name that represents a future in which we are all free,” the petition reads.
Thursday evening (September 30), the petition had collected more than 1,200 signatures, most of them professional astronomers or students of astronomy.
NASA had previously said it would consider the name change request. That job is now complete, and the agency sticks to the name, NPR reported Thursday.
“We have not found any evidence yet to justify changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope,” current NASA chief Bill Nelson told NPR.
The news, and the way it was delivered, was not well received by University of Washington astrophysicist Sarah Tuttle, one of the four creators of the petition. (The others are Lucianne Walkowicz of JustSpace Alliance and Adler Planetarium in Chicago; Chanda Prescod-Weinstein of the University of New Hampshire; and Brian Nord, of Fermilab and the University of Chicago.)
NASA is counting on cowardice and poor PR technique to disclose it will not rename JWST, after a career administrator who has overseen homophobic persecution and the development of psychological warfare, ignoring demand review of 1,200 astronomers, ”Tuttle said. wrote on Twitter Thursday, towards the end of a series of tweets about the name announcement.
“They ignored both the petitioners and the advisory committee who called for an investigation, and provided no details of their research or decision,” Tuttle said. added in another tweet.
The James Webb Space Telescope is optimized to see the cosmos in infrared light and has a main mirror 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter, nearly three times the size of Hubble’s. After launching in mid-December from French Guiana atop an Ariane 5 rocket, the observatory will head towards the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable location about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) of his home planet.
Once there, the telescope will perform a variety of hard-hitting scientific work, from studying some of the universe’s earliest stars and galaxies to looking for signs of life in nearby atmospheres. alien planets.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about finding alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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