The Hubble Space Telescope is incredible and has
done some truly remarkable
science, but it’s getting old. After all, it was launched in 1990. Taking
its place is the James Webb Space Telescope, an $8 billion-plus experiment that
was scheduled to launch in October 2018.
Not anymore.
Today, NASA announced in a press release that they’d be pushing the launch of the
telescope back to Spring of 2019 from French Guyana. They claim the reason is
not “indicative of hardware or technical performance concerns,” but rather,
“the integration of the various spacecraft elements is taking longer than
expected,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission
Directorate at Headquarters in Washington, said in the release.
In other words, it’s taking more time to put
together than they thought.
The James Webb Space Telescope is supposed to
be awesome. Specific science goals include peering into the distant
universe to capture the light from the first galaxies and stars, comparing the
oldest galaxies with galaxies today, looking through dust clouds invisible to
Hubble to see stars form, and even studying the atmospheres of planets outside
the solar system.
These images and data will be both incredible and useful for
scientists trying to understand who we are and how we got here on the grandest
scales.
The change in date came after a “routine
schedule assessment” reviewed all of the tasks remaining plus other factors,
mentioning that the spacecraft “has experienced delays during its integration
and testing at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California.” They mention
that, on the bright side, they’ll have more time to test it (although that
shouldn’t be necessary if there are no hardware or technical performance
concerns, right guys?).
We’ve reached out to NASA for comment.
The release says that the existing budget
accommodates for the change in date, so we’ll just have to wait a little longer
for some dank new space pictures.
[NASA]