Author Topic: Deep Space and Interplanetary Exploration - Houston, we are go for launch!  (Read 117455 times)

glitterboy2098

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So the JWST is in orbit already? How long before it goes online for observations?

Frabby

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So the JWST is in orbit already? How long before it goes online for observations?
It's en route to the sun/earth L2 point, 1.5 million km out. Roughly 4 weeks of travel time, and altogether 6 months until it is completely unfolded, cooled down, calibrated and ready.
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kato

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So the JWST is in orbit already? How long before it goes online for observations?
JWST will arrive in its target orbit (around the Earth-Sun L2 point) in about 4 weeks.

Planned start of scientific observations is in 6 months.

Daryk

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And sharing those observations with the world will take slightly longer than that, but not too much...  ^-^

Sabelkatten

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I expect there will be data much sooner, after all there's no reason not to release any test pictures taken.

kato

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And sharing those observations with the world will take slightly longer than that, but not too much...  ^-^
"James Webb Space Telescope ‘Early Release Science’ Data Release" is planned for "June/July 2022" according to ESA's scientific highlights schedule for next year.

For scale of "early release" in this kind of matter though, consider that Gaia for example is currently in an 18-month period between "early release" and "full release" for DR3. And the amount of data generated onboard is not that different (Gaia is specced for about 15 TB/year for its downlink after onbord AI-controlled pre-cropping, JWST is specced for 11 TB/year).

Daryk

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That's definitely one way to demonstrate the inverse square law!  :thumbsup:

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Yeah, the web's going to have to take it easy when it unfolds it's a solar panels and other stuff. It's very fragile from everything I've read.
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kato

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That's definitely one way to demonstrate the inverse square law!  :thumbsup:
Gaia is at the same place JWST is going, a lissajous orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, i.e. the same distance of about 1.5 million kilometers (0.01 AU).

The downlink capacity on JWST is actually faster than on Gaia (maximum 28 vs 7.6 MBit/s, effective 18 vs 5 MBit/s).

The difference is that JWST is built around utilizing specific pre-planned communication windows on DSN as per NASA policy - two times 4 hours per day, transmitting a maximum of 65 GB, which is the limit of its onboard data storage. Gaia instead uses variable communication windows on ESTRACK of up to 14 hours length (depending on what it is scanning, i.e. how many points of interests the AI crops out of its sensor data), and has sufficient data storage to keep data available for sending it down over the next several days or weeks if necessary.

rebs

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Kato, thank you for bringing your knowledge to the table.  I learn more from a single paragraph here than in ten news articles.
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Daryk

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Indeed, thanks for the extra detail!  :thumbsup:

idea weenie

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I expect there will be data much sooner, after all there's no reason not to release any test pictures taken.

Very true - here is the first test picture taken:
https://i.imgur.com/aOtlBMx.jpg

ANS Kamas P81

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Daryk

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:toofunny:

Failure16

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Okay, so it's not a new theory (and this is only the abstract besides), but wrap your tentacles around this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798

And if you want to simply read an article about it:

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/228094/20180521/paper-suggests-octopuses-came-from-space-heres-why-octopuses-are-so-fascinating.htm#:~:text=Octopus%20From%20Space%3F%20A%20study%20published%20in%20the,to%20the%20planet%20via%20icy%20bodies%20from%20space.

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rebs

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I thought everyone knew all critters with eight appendages are of alien origin. ???
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rebs

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In JWST news, the space telescope is beginning to unfurl its delicate solar shade...

https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-sunshield-deployment-begins?utm_campaign=socialflow
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idea weenie

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Here is the NASA page on the James Webb telescope, with a schedule at the top so we can see how it is going:
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html

rebs

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Here is another article that postulates that primordial black holes account for 100% of dark matter.

https://scitechdaily.com/are-black-holes-and-dark-matter-the-same-astrophysicists-upend-textbook-explanations/
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Maingunnery

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Here is another article that postulates that primordial black holes account for 100% of dark matter.

https://scitechdaily.com/are-black-holes-and-dark-matter-the-same-astrophysicists-upend-textbook-explanations/
Interesting idea, it does give me the question of what the current distribution would be of those small black holes.
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worktroll

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Problem is, so-called "dark matter" gets the "dark" bit because it can't be seen. Over billions of lightyears, all of the 'rational' explanations would show up.

- If it were extrasolar planets drifting in the void, we'd see the effects
- If it was dense clouds of cool interstellar gas, we'd see the effects
- If it was cold, non-rotating neutron stars, we'd see the effects
- And if it were primordial black holes - see later objection - we'd see the effects

Second, I refer to Stephen Hawking's famous 1960spaper, "Fuzzy black holes have no hair." Short form: black holes evaporate. Spontaneous particle-antiparticle pairs forming very near the event horizon can in the right circumstances lose one of the pair to the black hole, but the other escapes - the "fuzzy" part. But the emitted particle tells you nothing about the interior of the black hole, which then "has no hair."

The rate of Hawking radiation - as it's called - is inversely dependant on the curvature of the event horizon. Black holes over Chandrasekhar limit - 1.4 solar masses - are IIRC likely to take longer than the likely life of the Universe to evaporate, which is a good thing, as it would leave behind a naked singularity, and as we all know, physics - and astrophysicists - break down in the presence of a naked singularity.

Small primordial black holes evaporate much more quickly, and the odds of any primordial black holes lasting 13+ billion years is - like the odds of dark matter being more than a modern form of Plato's epicycles - zero. Plus, the final stage of evaporation is highly energetic, and would be seen (but not strong enough to explain GRBs.)
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rebs

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Glad someone is always around to break these things down.  Worktroll, you get the gold star of the day!  :thumbsup:

Thanks for your explanation.  I'm just an English major.   A curious one, but still, better suited to writing stories than figuring astrophysics.   
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Daryk

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The caveat I'd throw at Worktroll's explanations is "can't be seen by current technology".  The assumptions being made about those things were made with the technology that couldn't see the exoplanets we know about.

worktroll

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Dark matter is too much "I have these observations that don't fit. In order to explain them, I would need these exact properties, which are virtually impossible to test for. Please provide grant money."

Dark energy, by comparison, is currently at "I have these observations that don't fit. If they're caused by X, then we can test that by observing Y. Please provide grant money."

The latter is good science; the former is career-building, IMHO. And I lean towards "dark energy" being an outcome of lack of understanding how space-time behaves on very macro scales, which is in fact testable.

With "dark matter", solutions fall into two main classes - MACHOs and WIMPs. Massive Astronomical Compact Halo Objects - dead planets, brown dwarves, cool neutron stars - could explain the 'missing mass', except as mentioned above they would be detectable over very long distances via gravitational lensing, etc, and are largely considered not to be a solution. Primordial black holes would be MACHOs, and hence detectable if they existed.

Weakly Interacting Massive Particles are theoretically cleaner. Consider the photino, a theoretical anti-particle of the photon which only interacts with fermionic matter via gravity, and then only very weakly. Would be an ideal 'solution'.  Except they're only detectable by theoreticians seeking grant money, with properties that are defined by what they can't be, rarely what they could be tested to be. Hence my references to the "modern epicycles."
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worktroll

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The caveat I'd throw at Worktroll's explanations is "can't be seen by current technology".  The assumptions being made about those things were made with the technology that couldn't see the exoplanets we know about.

I would agree we couldn't detect exoplanets directly until recently. Problem is, for enough exoplanets and other MACHOs to supply the missing mass, or even a reasonable fraction thereof, then the distant stars would be "twinkling" - those "beelions and beelions" of parsecs add up very small chances into near-unity. IMHO, of course!
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Daryk

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Worktroll, you know I respect you as a person... it's the arguments being made I'm less sure of.  I think your first argument is connected to the second really.  It's mostly down to grants...  ::)

worktroll

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That's all right. I'm a product of my time & education, and I have a serious downer on the whole "dark matter" thing. The observable issues are real; I just find the proposed explanations all tend to fail the falsifiable test. And I have seen a lot of money get poured into it, which I'd rather have spent on getting a few folks and a backhoe to Mars, for example ;)
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* It was a glorious time for people who felt that we didn't have enough Marauder variants - HABeas2, re "Empires Aflame"

Natasha Kerensky

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Dark matter is too much "I have these observations that don't fit. In order to explain them, I would need these exact properties, which are virtually impossible to test for. Please provide grant money."

Dark energy, by comparison, is currently at "I have these observations that don't fit. If they're caused by X, then we can test that by observing Y. Please provide grant money."

... the former is career-building...

... they're only detectable by theoreticians seeking grant money, with properties that are defined by what they can't be, rarely what they could be tested to be. Hence my references to the "modern epicycles."

Those statements are woefully ignorant of the state of research in these topics and scientific process in general.  They’re also grossly unfair to the physicists and astrophysicists doing the work.

This is how science works.  You make observations.  Certain observations don’t match law or theory.  So you come up with a hypothesis that does explain the observations.  You figure out way(s) to test that hypothesis.  Sometimes those tests cost money.

Observations raising the issue of dark matter have been around since the 1930s.  In the early 1990s, I worked with a theorist on large-scale structure who tried to explain it without initial dark matter fluctuations.  He didn’t ask for grants.  He worked it out on chalkboards and laptops.  We’re finally going to put his and dozens and dozens of other dark matter theories to the test with JWST observations.  JWST is a very expensive telescope, but it or something very much like it is required to see the young universe early enough to rule-out or rule-in certain dark matter hypotheses.  No one is involved on JWST to test the impossible or for grant money.

I was at one of the two institutions whose extragalactic supernova observations in the 1990s first raised the issue of dark energy.  I had a small hand on a panel of astrophysicists who defined the follow-on to JWST, which, among other things, will measure thousands of extragalactic standard candles, reducing mathematical uncertainty about the accelerating expansion of the universe, which will rule-out or rule-in certain hypotheses about the dark energy driving it.  No one is involved in the Roman Space Telescope for the sake of “epicycles” or because only theoreticians can test dark energy.

The natures of dark matter and dark energy are hard to solve not because researchers enjoy writing grants (they absolutely do not) nor because our profession rewards going down known dead-ends (it absolutely does not — terrible way to get published, win awards, and advance up the ladder).  Dark matter and dark energy are hard to figure out because they’re not luminous sources of light like stars.  We can only observe their influence indirectly.  It’s like trying to understand something by looking at its shadow.  A circular shadow could be cast by a circular disk, a ball, the base of a column, the base of a cone, or any number of other objects.  Trying to test for disks, balls, columns, and cones without being able to see or touch those objects — only the shadow — is immensely difficult.  Dark matter and dark energy have the same problem, only magnified many-fold.

If someone has a shortcut on this kind of research, please, bring it forward.  Otherwise, those of us on this forum, and ombudsmen in particular, shouldn’t be ignorantly denigrating the work of others or assigning them malicious intentions.

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And I have seen a lot of money get poured into it, which I'd rather have spent on getting a few folks and a backhoe to Mars, for example

This is also a woefully ignorant statement.  I’ve also had jobs funding NASA planetary science missions and human space flight.  They don’t compete for the same pots of money.  Moreover, we could wipe out all the astrophysics theory grants at NASA, NSF, and DOE for a year and not even get a single, cheap cargo mission to the ISS.
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rebs

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Some may think it ignorant to want to actually press the envelope of Planetary exploration.  But I agree.  I would also wish to have seen more energy, drive, and financial support for actual efforts in colonization.  At least the drive and energy of the Apollo Program and it's results.  Imagine where we would be if that had continued.
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