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JWST Launch NASA Livestream

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Re: JWST Launch NASA Livestream

#21
post #5

Either going to be a huge, incredible, historic event, or a massive Christmas Day tragedy. Hoping for the former - good luck NASA! E: Wow, the coverage about the hurricane causing leaks in the buildings is wild. The pictures of tarps over computer desks makes me unreasonably uncomfortable.

It worked!

Re: JWST Launch NASA Livestream

#23

Good launch. And over 472k viewers on the livestream. Good service by YouTube. (I don't get to praise them often, credit where due.) All launch events seemed precisely on schedule and trajectory. The 2nd stage even caught the solar panel deploy on camera, which I believe was an unexpected bonus. Now we've got 30 days of deployment events, another 300 or so SPOFs to clear. Arrival at L2 in a month. Six months to chill…

> 472k viewers on the livestream We had about 11K on STS 82, which I still think was the high point of my career. Back in the day with capacity being what it was that put a serious strain on the internet as a whole, shortly after that we had to move to the other side of the Atlantic be able to continue to operate.

Great anecdote!

Re: JWST Launch NASA Livestream

#24
post #7

Super exiting. * JWST costs ~$10B, about the same as Large Hadron Collider or aircraft carrier. * JWST has 344 single-point-of-failures (SPOF), 80% of them related to deployment. * No ability for repair. JWST goes to orbit the Sun 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth, almost 4 times the distance between Earth and Moon. * Ariane 5 launch failure rate is 0.045 --- assuming 0.045 launch failure probability, and 0.…

I’m much more concerned about what will happen once the telescope is in operation. We can’t send astronauts to L2 to fix it like we could send them to Hubble on STS.

Re: JWST Launch NASA Livestream

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 472k viewers on the livestream We had about 11K on STS 82, which I still think was the high point of my career. Back in the day with capacity being what it was that put a serious strain on the internet as a whole, shortly after that we had to move to the other side of the Atlantic be able to continue to operate.

Great anecdote!

https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1474767067236777991

Re: JWST Launch NASA Livestream

#26
post #24
post #7

Super exiting. * JWST costs ~$10B, about the same as Large Hadron Collider or aircraft carrier. * JWST has 344 single-point-of-failures (SPOF), 80% of them related to deployment. * No ability for repair. JWST goes to orbit the Sun 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth, almost 4 times the distance between Earth and Moon. * Ariane 5 launch failure rate is 0.045 --- assuming 0.045 launch failure probability, and 0.…

I’m much more concerned about what will happen once the telescope is in operation. We can’t send astronauts to L2 to fix it like we could send them to Hubble on STS.

We can't yet, but doing so isn't entirely out of the question. It's easier than sending anyone to Mars. The one-way trip time for astronauts to L2 might be 25 days.

https://www.wired.com/2012/04/100-day-mission-to-sun-earth-l...

Re: JWST Launch NASA Livestream

#29

From the broadcast: "Liftoff from a tropical rain forest at the edge of time itself." What does that mean?

It was “to the edge of time itself” which I guess is some kind of reference to the telescope being able to observe the early universe? It seemed kind of cheesy.

Re: JWST Launch NASA Livestream

#30

From the broadcast: "Liftoff from a tropical rain forest at the edge of time itself." What does that mean?

It is 'to the edge of time' and what they mean with it is that the JWST can look very far back into our past to the earliest days of the universe with its instruments that are capable of observing severely red-shifted wavelengths.
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