“Many of the components of JWST's Ariane 5 launcher have been arriving at Kourou from Europe in the past week, so that's all going well.”
#Webb telescope date slips again serial#
The new launch date is “indeed due to the preceding Ariane 5 launch and the serial nature of launch prep - No technical or other issues on the side of the spacecraft,” McCaughrean tells Inverse. Mark McCaughrean, an astronomer and member of the ESA science team for the telescope, had previously told Inverse that the launch of the Webb was dependent on the VA255 launch schedule and that the former could change if the latter were to slip. “This has resulted in a new targeted launch date of December 18 for JWST.” “Arianespace has fine-tuned the sequence and support for VA255 (French Military) and the VA256 (JWST) launch support at CSG in French Guiana,” Mark Voyton, NASA’s launch site manager for the Webb telescope mission, tells Inverse. Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Why was the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope delayed?ĮSA is launching the Webb on an Ariane 5 from its facility near Kuoru in French Guiana, but the site only allows for the preparation of one rocket launch at a time, and a launch scheduled for the French Military, VA255, is in line ahead of NASA and the Webb and currently scheduled to launch on October 22.
It’s the latest of many delays in a project that has been underway since the late 1980s, but probably a small - and hopefully final bump - before the Webb telescope can finally take up its destined position far from the Earth and begin hunting alien worlds, and peering back into the earliest days of the universe. NASA announced Wednesday that the launch of the Webb telescope aboard an ESA Ariane 5 rocket is set for December 18, 2021, but prior to the announcement, the two space agencies were targeting late October to get the telescope off the ground. The good news: Webb is still launching by the end of 2021. “I hope that, in just a few days here, we will be in good shape.The bad news: The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the decades in the making, big-freaking-mirror-equipped successor to the Hubble, has been delayed yet again. “It’s just the right thing to do right now, to do these tests, to make sure everything is as ready as we hope they are,” he said. “For sheer caution, what we have done after these calculations is gone back to a small number of subsystems and just do the functional tests to make sure that, with all of that conservatism, to be sure that nothing happened.” He said that, because JWST is so close to launch, it did not have sensors that had been in place when it was transported to French Guiana to measure the effect of the clamp release on the spacecraft, leaving only calculations estimating the force imparted on it. 22 press conference about the upcoming launch of the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.
“Of course, when you work on a $10 billion telescope, conservatism is the order of the day,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said when asked about the incident during a Nov. 18 briefings about the science and instruments of JWST, saying at the time that the mission was still on schedule for a Dec. NASA officials did not mention it during a pair of Nov. It’s not clear exactly when the incident took place other than in the last few days. In that incident, according to the NASA statement, a “sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band” that secures JWST to its launch vehicle adapter “caused a vibration throughout the observatory.” Those activities, the statement added, were the responsibility of Arianespace. 22 to perform additional testing of the spacecraft after the incident. NASA said that, working in conjunction with the European Space Agency and Arianespace, it has delayed the launch of JWST on an Ariane 5 from Dec. 22 that it is delaying the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope by at least four days to investigate an incident that took place preparing the spacecraft for launch in French Guiana.
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