James Webb is not a replacement for Hubble

The James Webb Space Telescope with its golden honeycomb design and metallic sails is without a doubt the most beautiful of space telescopes and after much delay it was launched last year to its destination at the LaGrange 2 gravitational equilibrium point, where it is now is in calibration work so that in a few more months it will surprise us with an image that will leave us breathless. But with all the attention it has received lately, we forget the telescope that has taken our breath away with its images for 30 years, the space telescope that has produced 19,000 studies and that has changed the way we understand the universe, the Hubble .

James Webb is not a replacement for Hubble it is primarily a visible light telescope with a little bit of infrared and a little bit of ultraviolet and James Webb will only be able to observe a small portion of visible light, orange and red, and the rest of its sensitivity it is in the infrared, which gives it very different capabilities than Hubble. Its composite mirror has much more surface area than Hubble's, so it promises to deliver spectacular images, but this does not mean that it will be a replacement once the young man reaches the end of his useful life.

Telescopes are launched into space not because it is easy or cheap, it is because there are advantages to it, one of them is that it does not depend on the weather to make your observations, if the sky fills with clouds there is nothing you can do with a telescope here on earth, rather than waiting for it to clear, that's why normally the observatories are in very dry places, but even if there are no clouds, the same air, the wind, the temperature difference between different layers of the atmosphere distort the vision of the telescope, that is the reason why we usually build them in high places so that there is less amount of atmosphere, and therefore turbulence, between the telescope and the stars. You have noticed how the stars twinkle, that is, it seems that they are changing their intensity all the time, that is due to the turbulence of the air that amplifies or diminishes the intensity of their brightness when in fact their intensity is fixed, in the majority of the Sometimes stars outside the atmosphere as unblinking points of light.

The other reason why it is a good idea to have telescopes outside the atmosphere is that there are certain frequencies of light that are absorbed by the atmosphere and therefore do not reach the surface where the ground-based telescopes are, for example, much of the infrared and ultraviolet light do not reach the surface with good intensity because the light is absorbed in the atmosphere before reaching it, the same properties of the atmosphere that protect us from ultraviolet radiation that can damage our tissue, also makes it difficult for us to observe astronomical objects in those types of light or wavelengths. And all the wavelengths or frequencies of light are important for the different types of observations and science that will take place in space without an atmosphere in between, telescopes can see all these types of light without problems.

There is a third advantage of space telescopes over terrestrial ones, that they can observe basically any point in the sky while terrestrial ones are limited by their geographical position, a telescope in Chile, for example, will miss a part of the northern sky and vice versa, while an orbiting telescope like James Webb can literally see any point in the sky simply by timing its observations with specific times in its orbit.

It was 10 billion dollars, which is more or less what the James Webb Space Telescope cost. It sounds like a lot of money to spend on science, you just have to remember that it is being spent by the country that spent thirty times more, that is, 320 billion dollars. in developing an F-35 fighter jet, $10 billion well spent on science is nothing to America and benefits us all because knowing more benefits us all. Hubble received a last maintenance mission that was carried out in 2009 that would include all possible tasks to extend its useful life as much as possible and they achieved it, we are in 2022 and Hubble is still working, although not without some worrying moments during the In recent years, like in 2019, when his field camera, the one that takes the most flirty photos, was temporarily disabled due to a software failure and other subsequent problems that have left him in safe mode for several months. But in the meantime Hubble is working as usual, you have to be aware that in some perhaps not too distant future a breakdown will render it unusable unless we find a way to maintain it when the space shuttle was retired in 2011 the space telescope was basically left to its fate until another orbital vehicle has the capacity to give it the maintenance it needs, but the current candidates, the SpaceX dragon capsule or NASA's Orion, are still years away from being ready for this type of activity, so the forecast is not too great .

We just have to hope that it lasts many more years and that we put a successor with a better visible-light telescope in orbit than Hubble before its end.

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