LONDON: NASA expects that the Hubble Space Telescope will keep beaming back amazing data and photos for at least the next five years. But what happens after the long-running space telescope gets put out to cosmic pasture?
Don’t worry. NASA has a plan. By 2018, the space agency hopes to launch the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a new instrument designed to see farther into space than ever before.
“I fully expect Webb to have the same sort of groundbreaking effect on astronomy that Hubble has had,” NASA astronomer Amber Straughn told Mashable. “It’s going to be so much more powerful that I think it will once again revolutionize the way we understand the universe.”
Scientists hope that JWST will be able to expand on Hubble’s legacy, gathering more data about the first galaxies that popped into existence in the early days of the universe. The telescope will be able to see the universe in infrared wavelengths of light, allowing it to cut through dust to see the star formations beneath.
