How NASA's $10 Billion Origami Telescope Will Unfold The Early Universe 

That solar panel deploy kinda freaked the guy with the Hawaiian shirt

Now, for the really hard part, the unfolding of the sun shield!

@@hououinkyouma1458 Easy part over. The hard part begins

@@shrimppasta5544 Lets hope the engineers used a scale to fold the paper and not eyeballed it xP

A whole bunch of people at the ESA and Arianespace just breathed a big collective sigh of relief.

Fingers crossed!!

unpack safe ..

Wait until the manned mission to mars comes time 😆

Great post space cadet I'll send you a buzz lightyear official certificate of achievement.

People keep saying "most expensive". This is 3 days of the budget of the U.S. military, one year. JWST, 10 years.

@@veramae4098 I think you answered the wrong thread

Then only 343 unfolding's to go ;:) Gonne be 30 days of terror before it reaches full configuration and the Lagrange point

One of the galaxies it sees may contain a world where the rocket blew up with their James web telescope.

@@Viktorreznov1942 The Universe is finite, you are thinking of multi universe :)

so are the artists working on the new "photographs"

@@urduib no that's not how it works

@ARIANA'S NEIGHBOUR Here take It👍

If not by way more

I would cry if the rocket blows up

@@duckgoesquack4514 Blowing up is just one of so many ways this can go wrong.

I would put money on a catastrophic failure of the telescope……So many single points of failure available

No, all we want is a successful deployment.

I've been posting about a 1 kilometer optical telescope (instead of that abysmally stupid StarShot) so now I'll add a 1 kilometer infrared 'scope. Both out at Neptune's orbit. Anyone recall "Destinies," a paperback "Analog"? One science article was about telescopes (1978). A ring of 1km 'scopes in Neptune's orbit [the author claimed] would resolve flags waving on planets in the Andromeda galaxy.

Higgs Boson was the last time I think when we were waiting for confirmation

@Bobb Grimley Sorry, sorry.... That came out terribly... What I meant was, I *L I T E R A L L Y* hope your house burns down on Christmas, Bobbbbb

@Bobb Grimley My reaction? Who the fuck spends Christmas morning nit-picking yt comments? Another lonely one Boss?

@Bobb Grimley I don't think you get to make snide remarks about anyone's maturity when your response to someone's excitement about the palpable scientific progress occurring before all of our eyes is to critique their usage of "literally" and make IQ jokes.

@Bobb Grimley You have to be going along with it as like a bit now or something, right?

Godspeed!!!!

The launch itself is about as routine as the launch of a heavy launch vehicle can be (still not without risk, of course, and with the most expensive payload ever), but the deployment process? Two weeks of terror...

I've never been more nervous about a deployment than a launch, but yeah the launch can still go wrong! Let everything be nominal! And then we can worry about deployment. And THEN we can worry about the instruments tuning correctly! Basically if we can do science in six months we can stop worrying, that's a long time to be freaking out.

@@ArKritz84 mmh, well something could still be shaken loose during the ascent. that sunshield sounds crazy fragile.

Oh, I know exactly how you feel! I'm going to be (figuratively) holding my breath until we start getting usable data from it!

🤞

to be fair, there are cuts in the dialogue, but at this point he just integrate them effortlessly with delivery

Check out the size of his hands.....

@@c130fan His knowledge is impressive, but it's not to hard to hide cuts behind putting those images on screen. I do simmilar things a lot

SM is in the big league..... he's got a teleprompter!

I usually watch his videos 3 or 4 times just to walk away with a fair understanding

Big props to him👏👏

@ARIANA'S NEIGHBOUR Don't self promote in other people's comments. Just don't do it.

@ARIANA'S NEIGHBOUR cringe

Webb.... James Webb...👾👍

@ARIANA'S NEIGHBOUR please piss of with your self promoting crap.

Arguably THE most important.

Finally someone not complaining in the comment section. Thanks for having a sense of humour lol

I like your confidence and I hope you are right!

Why

and CSA

If it works, It’ll be the second best thing NASA has done after Apollo 11.

I appreciate the positive vibes because my anxiety would be off the charts if I had been on a team that worked on it.

It seams as though the Hubble would still be very useful exploring the nearer (relatively) areas while the Webb reaches into the far past!

@@reginaromsey Hubble will continue to be useful right up until the day it goes offline. Given that it's been up there for 30 years or more, I fear that day will be sooner rather then later.

It's l33t to y33t

Kurtzgesagt has started that trend, and i love it

yeah

Interesting idea you have. You are right that Webb is a monument. However, I am wondering if curiosity is the ultimate expression of humanity. Curiosity is common to nearly every living creature. It is almost necessary to survive. As you suggested, building Webb took curiosity combined with effort, resources, cooperation, determination, etc. Less common than curiosity is compassion as you said, and you could also add generosity, self-sacrifice, benevolence. Any of these, especially when given to strangers who offer no benefit to the giver, are quite noble and unique to mankind.

Surely Voyager is our greatest monument. Because eventually, Voyager will be the only evidence we ever existed.

Yes, came here for this info. He explained it very well.

I did a double take on that too

It's a technical term.

It’s not stable. Even with active correction, the orbit is going to wobble all over the place.

If the US DoD budget for this year was instead spent on science, we could have had 73xJWSTs in just one year.

@@thePronto you do not suggest reducing that DoD budget, isn't it?

Can white people claim any of this excellence?

@@NwoDispatcher Are you on crack?

@@GetIsekaid why can Every other ethnic group claim ownership on anything they succeed at except for diasporic euros... my previous comment was deleted by RU-vid fyi

aw thats nice which is your favorite exoplanet and when will you visit it in person. I would love to see all you space fans take rides to deep space and start a colony.

@@brontehauptmann4217 I regularly follow up on Tabby's Star mainly because I did so in college as well

It's unwrapping the mirror that concerns me!

@@andrewd7112 my method of unwrapping would end it. Rip, tear, shred wrappings on the floor as I gloat over new goodie. Only works on Earth with paper and ribbon.

also a demonstration of how much we can delay things, considering that it was originally supposed to launch in 2007

@@pentasteve9723 , don't say "we" until you personally contributed to the project in any significant capacity. If you think solving a technical problem of this scale is easy, why don't you step up and start on the next space telescope. Just show 'em how it's done, you know 🤷🏻‍♂️

Nanometer precision at 1.5 million kilometers? What could go wrong? 😅

@@debayanDas Common people pay for this stuff with their taxes. Do you think the launch is financed out of scientists pockets? So silence yourself.

@@PuerRidcully , oooh genius. Did you go ask your military to stop working first? I don't seem to recall any necessary war going on right now. Think twice before harping about tax funded projects, dude.

I'm amazed that lowering the sunshield platforms is expected to take 4 hours. I think they could have invested in just a little more horsepower for those motors. What do they run on, expanding wax?

@@stargazer7644 Is it perhaps to keep vibrations to an absolute minimum? Or perhaps to reduce power. I dunno.

100% this is a concern they would have addressed. After spending 10 billion dollars, they sure as hell better not have overlooked anything.

There will have been a lot of testing done to ensure that pivots and sliding mechanisms are able to work in their environment. NASA and their contractors have cold chambers which are capable of achieving very low vacuum pressures, and so can test elements for proper function in a "near space" (bar gravity) environment. This isn't to say stuff can't or won't go wrong. Let's hope the engineers did their work well...

You keep using that word. I’m not sure it means what you think it means.

Caps lock on.

@Mind Blown CAPS LOCK ON

Abysmal actually means very few in this context, by the way

We might not be technically alone in the universe, but if the nearest neighbours are so far away that their civilisation has crashed by the time they get our message and/or ours has crashed by the time their reply gets here, then we may as well be alone.

We can't see past the beginning of the universe, ignoring the logical inconsistency, our current understanding says that the universe would have been opaque for some period shortly after the big bang, this would be the farthest back we could possibly see.

Only way we can expand the capability further would be to construct an observatory on the far side of the Moon. By 'construct' I mean having the facilities on the Moon neccessary to produce the mirror there. Optics made on Earth are limited in size due to gravity-- make a lens or mirror too large, the sheer weight of the optic will pull itself out of shape. The Moon has 1/6 the gravity, so you can build mirrors there that are far bigger than any we can make on Earth. Plus, a night on the Moon lasts two weeks. Observatories on Earth are not only limited by daylight, but also by the fact the globe is spinning once every 24 hours-- your objective disappears beneath the horizon in a matter of hours. On the Moon, you can lock onto an objective for days on end.

Time and space are connected one needs the other. A telescope is designed to see light going through space thus it will never be able to look past the beginning not even if you make a telescope as big as you can imagine. As Neil said "The universe is not obligated to make sense to our senses."

All Hubble images are made in a studio by an artist

@@brontehauptmann4217 While this is true, there is science behind the images. The same general principle can be applied to JWST images

@@Tomec86 The only thing behind the images is Babylonian mysticism reheated under the name of Kaballah.

@@brontehauptmann4217 Huh?

@@aarorissanen930 That's right. Due to severe educational deficiencies in the U.S. no one knows where the Mideast is let alone anything about their ancient teachings. Google Kaku and Kabbalah then look for a video, Kaku will set you straight.

At least at this point scrubs will be mother nature rather than hardware issues.

Please remember the cost is only 3 days of the U.S. military annual budget.

When you spend that kind of money on a telescope I'm sure all the science engineer team members were well paid.

@Bobb Grimley I mean common sense would tell you based on what the telescope is supposed to do, they didnt pay for a prop, but I guess you want to believe people with money just throw it but nope, its the cost of making something better than spitzer

@Bobb Grimley ambitions cost

Indeed sir

you don't have a decade pops, no one does.

What about the whole time it’s unfolding and getting through those 340-something single points of failure?

Assuming it doesn't fail, crash, get lost, blow up, collide with aliens that can't drive, don't have a license, .... uh, tangent? I expect the telescope to cause some major rethinking about the verse (Firefly term). For one thing, it should dissolve the Big Bang theory, which I've never thought viable or logical. It should bring a new level of questions about the true nature of physics, particularly quantum physics. That alone could result eventually in some better understanding leading to FTL, gravity, even basic reality. So, let's hope so, since mankind needs to break through these intellectual barriers we put around science.

I wasn't worried about the launch. ESA has done that over a hundred times. I'm worried about the JWST deployment, which has never been done before.

@@PlanetEarth3141 We can literally see the light from the Big Bang. We can see that almost every galaxy is moving away from every other one. We can see that farther galaxies are moving away faster, with the most distant ones at the speed of light. How is that not viable or logical?

@@stargazer7644 I’m glad you aren’t worried about the launch since it already happened.

The cross-your-fingers part isn’t over yet.

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I know this.🙂 But it is a moment to be happy about. Maybe there are more delicate/complex configuration milestones with the telescope itself but this is a big one. It's in one piece after launch and the trajectory is as expected. It's generating power, the first 2 course correction burns have been good, and I believe as I type this the high gain antenna has deployed autonomously.

Some of humans.

Humans are knowingly destroying their planet, they are also at war all the time and harming those weaker than them just because they can. BUT a few humans (scientists, engineers, technicians, etc..) are working for a brighter future.

Keep in mind they tested the entire unfolding process many times and thoroughly tested it in every condition it's going to go through.

@@descai10 True, but in the end testing in an artificially created environment on planet earth is not 100% representative of an environment no human has ever visited, 1.5 million kilometers away, where no mechanical assistance can be provided. To me, like Elon Musk's philosophy, fewer parts and less complexity is the way forward for making spacecraft reliable. JWST is the exact opposite of that, perhaps by necessity.

@@joyl7842 NASA delivered Perseverance to Mars recently (and Ingenuity, and Curiosity before), which was highly complex, so their current track record is good.

@@joyl7842 Never, EVER bring up that fool Musk in something regarding the complexity of spaceflight. The guy is a moron and hasn't the first clue what he is talking about. Also, NASA went through that "Faster, Better, Cheaper" phase in the 1990's after the failure of the Mars Observer (1993, cost $1 billion dollars) to reach Mars orbit, and ended up with several very high profile, expensive and publicly embarrassing mission failures, with the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander mishaps, just 2 months apart, the nadir of that period. Underfunding and poor project oversight and management were cited as major causes, all linked to that philosophy of trying to make cheaper missions, at a faster pace and less complexity. JWST is massively complex, yes, but to achieve the goals that this telescope has been set up to achieve, it *needed* to be this complex. Anything less wouldn't have achieved the science goals astronomers have been looking for after Hubble. So, less listening to Musk, and more listening to folks who know a thing or two about rockets, space telescopes and science in general, rather than a billionaire buffoon.

@@joyl7842 So, anything to add now that arguably the most difficult and complex part of the deployment - the sun shield - has successfully unfurled and fully tensioned up?