prettysadiereed
What people probably think I look like when looking up the h..
Published: April 28th 2025, 1:00:29 pm
What people probably think I look like when looking up the histories on things for this page (the glasses are legit though!).
Okay- some overdue nerdy space news! I can't keep up with the news cycle nowadays regarding space stuff - it's all happening pretty fast.
One of the headlines I always follow is about the James Webb telescope. Named for the NASA administrator who oversaw the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs of the 1960s, (James Webb), it's the most powerful telescope ever sent into space, dwarfing the Huddle Telescope. Its design was decades in the making, with initial ideas drafted in the 1990s and finally completed in 2016.
It was finally sent into space in 2021 to a point called "L-2" or Lagrange 2, which follows an oval halo around the Sun. LaGrange points are interesting - basically they're spots in space between Earth and the Sun that have a sort of equilibrium in gravity, pulling objects at a steady pace between them. This is great for a satellite because it's essentially remaining in a "steady" spot as the sun and Earth move through space together. The James Webb sits in L2, facing outward so that the light from the sun, Earth and Moon don't interfere with what it's looking at.
I could go on and on but there's a lot of cool documentaries on how they made this thing. One of the neat takeaways is that the telescope is SO powerful that it can look through space and essentially see "backwards" in time.