![]() ![]() Pushing back the launch by weeks rather than months or years is an indication that the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter for the successor to Hubble. Activity could be further hampered by a significant spread of the coronavirus.Ī delay of a few weeks is not much, considering the initial launch timeframe was around 2007. Vaccines are not yet broadly available in French Guyana, as Ars Technica notes. Meanwhile, the impact of COVID-19 has affected operations at the spaceport. Tests are scheduled for July and August to ensure the issue has been truly resolved before the Webb launch, but there's always the possibility of delays with those too. Launch provider Arianespace says the problem has been addressed with a redesign. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), will release its first full-color images and spectroscopic data on July 12, 2022. It has been grounded since last August because of an issue with the payload fairing. There's also the issue of the Ariane 5 rocket that's scheduled to transport Webb away from terra firma. ![]() That means the launch window will be mid-November at the earliest. After Webb arrives at the spaceport in French Guyana, it will take 55 days to prepare it for launch. That will likely happen towards the end of August. The telescope's director for launch services Beatriz Romero told reporters that shipping Webb and the readiness of the rocket and spaceport were all important considerations.įollowing extensive testing, NASA and the primary contractor on the project, Northrop Grumman, are edging closer to packing up the telescope into a shipping container, according to the agency's chief of science Thomas Zurbuchen. There are several factors that are key to determining a new launch date, according to Ars Technica. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System. A rescheduled date is unlikely to be confirmed until later this summer or perhaps in the fall. Webb will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. Thankfully, the launch might take place just a few weeks later, in November or early December. “I hope that, in just a few days here, we will be in good shape.NASA had been working toward an October 31st launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope, but it's having to delay the science observatory's trip into space once again. “It’s just the right thing to do right now, to do these tests, to make sure everything is as ready as we hope they are,” he said. “For sheer caution, what we have done after these calculations is gone back to a small number of subsystems and just do the functional tests to make sure that, with all of that conservatism, to be sure that nothing happened.” He said that, because JWST is so close to launch, it did not have sensors that had been in place when it was transported to French Guiana to measure the effect of the clamp release on the spacecraft, leaving only calculations estimating the force imparted on it. 22 press conference about the upcoming launch of the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. “Of course, when you work on a $10 billion telescope, conservatism is the order of the day,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said when asked about the incident during a Nov. 18 briefings about the science and instruments of JWST, saying at the time that the mission was still on schedule for a Dec. NASA officials did not mention it during a pair of Nov. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which astronomers hope will herald a new era of discovery, was again pushed back Tuesday until at least. ![]() It’s not clear exactly when the incident took place other than in the last few days. In that incident, according to the NASA statement, a “sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band” that secures JWST to its launch vehicle adapter “caused a vibration throughout the observatory.” Those activities, the statement added, were the responsibility of Arianespace. 22 to perform additional testing of the spacecraft after the incident. NASA said that, working in conjunction with the European Space Agency and Arianespace, it has delayed the launch of JWST on an Ariane 5 from Dec. 22 that it is delaying the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope by at least four days to investigate an incident that took place preparing the spacecraft for launch in French Guiana. ![]()
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