The James Webb Space Telescope observes infrared light, making cooling and protection from the Sun central to its design. Krishna Choudhary and Lester Nare discuss its observing location, sunshield, and instruments. The segment explains why controlling the telescope's own heat matters when looking for faint infrared signals from space.
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Webb observes infrared light and must limit heat that could interfere with its measurements.
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Its sunshield helps the telescope and instruments cool.
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The mid-infrared instrument requires additional active cooling.
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2:13:23Telescope. Um, it's in deep space orbit at the second Lrangee point. So, it's not even orbiting Earth. We just shot it out. It's out um in a little spot that's a stable orbit between the Earth and the Sun. It sort of chases us along or maybe we chase it. I forget which one L2 is, but in any case, um, it's got a giant goldccoated mirror, highly sensitive infrared instruments. It's got effectively like a helium cooling system to cool the instruments down so that it can take these pristine images and it is already rewriting astrophysics textbooks. Absolutely amazing. We talk about the results from the James Web almost every month.
2:14:04>> It's unbelievable. It's happening all the time. And we have Vera Rubin. We have um >> the Romans about to go up. There's just so many things that are just going to change our entire perspective of >> what we see in the night sky. And we are going to end with something that may feel curious on this list. But if you've stayed with us for part two only, part one and part two, or just are coming from the clips and find yourself here at this part of the episode, in 2025, we have seen a federal science funding contraction. And if you've seen the incredible advancements, the way it's impacted the lives of not only us, but all of humanity over this very short
2:14:46250ear period. All of this required an ecosystem that was willing to fund science when we didn't yet understand whether it was going to have a commercial benefit, a business benefit,