1st image of James Webb Space telescope(JWST)

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Webb Images of Jupiter and More Now Available In Commissioning Data – James Webb Space Telescope

blogs.nasa.gov

 

[Hex08]

20 years of work and $10 billion to get an image like a child's kaleidoscope. Meanwhile, America's infrastructure is at least 30 years outdated and our schools lag behind the rest of the world.

While there are certainly other worthwhile things to spend our money on it's not a situation where we can't spend money on other things and NASA. NASA is actually an excellent way to spend our tax dollars, it's one of the few government agencies to actually provide a return on our tax dollar investment. Science and technology are some of the largest financial drivers of our economy and NASA is at the forefront of that.

NASA Report Details How Agency Significantly Benefits US Economy - NASA

NASA released Friday the results of its first-ever agencywide economic impact report. The report shows that, through all NASA activities, the agency generated

www.nasa.gov

 

[Horwath]

uh-oh

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

We got 1st image from brand new JWST earlier today;
View attachment 253398

 

[briggart]

800 years ago, the rich and the educated planned and funded projects (gothic cathedrals) the completion of which they knew would not happen within their own lifetime. They did so regardlessly, and we still marvel at the results of their efforts almost a millennium later.
Why don't we (society, politicians) have the guts anymore to do such things? Tackle something so big it exceeds the sum of its individual parts? It saddens me that our thinking has shrunk so much...

We actually still do. Most cathedrals (and most ancient monuments/public works) were built in 10-30 years, which was a long time, but reasonably within the life-expectancy of lots of people even back then. Few projects took huge amount of times, but in most cases that had to do with design changes during construction, accidents, acts-of-gods style events (wars, natural disasters, etc.).

The design/construction timeframe of modern flagship level science projects (JWST, CERN colliders,...) is 10-15+ years. Then there is the time required to actually perform the experiment/observations and analyze the data, which can take several more years. Depending on the project, there can be a signifiant overlap between the team that designed/built the instrument and the one performing the scientific analysis of the results. So if you get involved in the early stages of this kind of projects as a young postdoc, you may end up spending a significant chunk of your work time on them for the next 20-30 years.

 

[Morrus]

800 years ago, the rich and the educated planned and funded projects (gothic cathedrals) the completion of which they knew would not happen within their own lifetime. They did so regardlessly, and we still marvel at the results of their efforts almost a millennium later.
Why don't we (society, politicians) have the guts anymore to do such things? Tackle something so big it exceeds the sum of its individual parts? It saddens me that our thinking has shrunk so much...

For the politicians, because their replacement will cancel whatever they started in 4 years, and every decision is polarised, so they only have a short window to make a minimal impact. In medieval times, a king was king for life.

 

[Umbran]

Why don't we (society, politicians) have the guts anymore to do such things?

In addition to what Morrus said, there's the matter that our culture seems to value personal success, with success defined as wealth and other personal power and influence, over community success, achievement, or well-being.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

This just goes to show how smart video game developers are. I have conquered at least .0000000000001 of these.

 

[Umbran]

Another way to compare Hubble to Webb images:

Webb Compare

www.webbcompare.com

 

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The Morning After: The 68GB SSD floating inside the James Webb Space Telescope

There’s a 68GB SSD floating inside the James Webb Space Telescope, US Congress calls for the FTC to regulate how VPN companies operate, UK forces Meta to halt its forced sale of Giphy.

www.engadget.com