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In a blow to NASA's prestige and budget, the next major US space telescope was postponed.
NASA announced Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope, which was due to launch into orbit around the sun this fall, will take another three years and another billion dollars to complete.
A report submitted to NASA by an independent evaluation committee estimated that the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $ 9.66 billion and that it would not be ready to be launched before 30 March 2021.
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The board of directors, led by Tom Young, former agency director and director of aerospace, was named last spring after pieces fell off the telescope during a test. from its main supplier, Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles.
In a press release, Mr. Young pointed out that the advancement of the Webb telescope was important to the progress of astronomy, but he added: "Ensure that every element of Webb is working properly before it." it is in the space is essential to its success. "
The telescope, named after the former NASA administrator James Webb is the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It's a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency.
More than twice as big as the Hubble, the Webb will be the largest and most powerful telescope ever built for space, but its development has been marked by headaches and delays.
Eight years ago, in the midst of budget overruns that threatened the solvency of other NASA projects and earned Webb the nickname "Nature's Astronomy Aware Telescope," Congress almost canceled the program. Instead, legislators have ordered a tight budget cap of $ 8.7 billion.
The new report means that NASA will surely exceed this ceiling at a cost that remains to be determined for other missions.
The Webb telescope mirror measures 6.5 meters in diameter, just over 21 feet, compared to 2.4 meters for the Hubble.
Seven times larger than the Hubble in light gathering capacity, the Webb has been designed to see further into the space and deeper into the past of the universe and the smoky consequences of the Big Bang.
Equipped with the kind of infrared goggles that give troops and police a night vision, the Webb would scan the clouds of dust and gas storms of the Milky Way in which stars and planets are born. He would be able to study the planets around other stars.
The goal is to explore an area of cosmic history from 150 million to one billion years after the beginning of time – known as the era of reionization, where new bright and violent stars and the burning radiance of the quasars burned a dark mist of hydrogen gas that reigned at the end of the Big Bang.
This ambition requires the Webb to be tuned to a different type of light than our eyes or the Hubble. Because the expansion of the cosmos precipitates so quickly these first stars and galaxies away from us, their light is "shifted to red" over longer wavelengths like the siren of an ambulance going on to a lower register.
Thus, the blue light of a fledgling galaxy brimming with new bright stars at the time has been extended to invisible infrared wavelengths, or thermal radiation, by the time it reaches us at $ 13 billion. Years later.
As a result, the Webb telescope will produce color cosmic postcards that no eye has ever seen. It also turns out that infrared emanations are the best way to study the exoplanets, the worlds beyond our own solar system that have been discovered by the thousands since the Webb telescope design.
In order to see these infrared colors, however, the telescope must be very cold – less than 45 degrees Fahrenheit over absolute zero – so that its own heat does not flood the heat of space. Once in the space, the telescope will unfold a giant umbrella the size of a tennis court to protect it from the sun. The telescope, abandoned in the permanent shadow of a million miles beyond the moon, will experience an infinite cold bath.
The visor consists of five thin layers, kite-shaped, a material called Kapton. Far too big to fit into a rocket, the shield, as well as the mirror of the telescope, will have to fall back. It will then be unfolded in space in a series of some 180 maneuvers that look at computer animations like a cross between a parachute opening and a pool cover in place. Engineers refer to this series of events as "six months of anxiety".
Or at least that was the $ 8 billion plan.
NASA revealed in March that several problems were posed during the tests. Among other things, the sunscreen of the size of a tennis court is torn during a training deployment. And the cables designed to keep the shield stretched had too much slack and could have hooked up during the real deployment in space, to a million kilometers of help.
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