100 times more potent than Hubble

Jean-Louis Santini reports at phys.org that

As the Hubble Space Telescope celebrates 25 years in space this week, NASA and its international partners are building an even more powerful tool to look deeper into the universe than ever before.

The James Webb Space Telescope will be 100 times more potent than Hubble, and will launch in 2018 on a mission to give astronomers an unprecedented glimpse at the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.

"JWST will be able to see back to about 200 million years after the Big Bang," NASA said on its website.

It described the telescope as a "powerful time machine with infrared vision that will peer back over 13.5 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies forming out of the darkness of the early universe."

Even more, the telescope should further the search for life elsewhere in the universe by opening a new window on planets outside the solar system—known as exoplanets—that might have water and orbit their stars at a suitable distance to prevent freezing or boiling.

Already, NASA's Kepler Space telescope, launched in 2009, has helped astronomers identify thousands of exoplanets. JWST is expected to propel that research even further.

The heavy telescope is scheduled to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket, made by the European Space Agency, from French Guiana in October 2018.

"Just as Hubble rewrote all the textbooks, Webb will rewrite it again,"

..."We have sensors on board, equipment on board that will enable us to study the atmosphere of exoplanets spectroscopically. So we will be able to understand the composition of those atmospheres," he added.

"We can make big progress in the search for life."

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