Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2022

MARCH-APRIL 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING scope at the end of 2020. This ab- sence of a space-based infrared ob- servatory is felt across all scales of observation in the universe. One set of targets expected to garner signif- icant Webb time – exoplanets – were only first confirmed to exist at all in 1992, two years after Hubble’s launch and two decades after Hub- ble began development. Because of the red-shifting of wavelengths of light due to the expansion of the universe, there are also objects on the far outskirts of the observable universe which Hubble would have been ideally suited to study – if only we could send it back in time non- trivial fractions of the age of the uni- verse itself. Spitzer provided shin- ing examples in Hubble’s own Ultra Deep Field image of very prominent, distant infrared sources that simply do not exist accordingly to Hubble’s detectors. These are galaxies that were radiating light in the visible spectrum but have had their pho- tons stretched into the infrared – a problem for one type of telescope T his infographic shows how the James Webb Space Telescope deployed after launch. [NASA] E ngineers on the ground remotely orchestrated a complex sequence of deployments in the hours and days immediately after the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. This animation shows the nominal sequence for these deployments. [NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center] one of the great achieve- ments in the history of as- tronomy and, arguably, the greatest contribution to science outreach ever created (just consider your desktop background. If it’s a galaxy, cluster, nebula, or planet, there’s a good chance its JPG or TIFF was obtained from a Hubble gallery). Hubble was de- signed for observation in the ultraviolet and visible parts of the electromag- netic spectrum, with only very limited capability of observing in the infrared. The absence of a broad, space-based infrared-de- tecting capability from as- tronomy’s complement of telescopes has only grown with the discoveries in observational astronomy since the launch of Hubble and has been felt even more with the retirements of such telescopes as the ESA’s Herschel Space Ob- servatory in 2013 and NASA’s Spitzer Space Tele-