37
votes
Why didn't JWST include any sensors capable of blue and green visible wavelengths
JWST's optical path includes more than just the large primary mirror. In the OTE (the telescope proper, rather than the instrumentation), there are three additional mirrors:
A secondary mirror, ...
33
votes
What is the orange material seen within the window frames of the Columbia Shuttle?
I can address "its precise function" although I don't know exactly what it was made of.
The pressurized crew compartment aka "crew module" of the shuttle Orbiter was a separate ...
28
votes
Why didn't JWST include any sensors capable of blue and green visible wavelengths
It all comes down to cost vs benefit
If you shoot something into space every gram of mass and every little bit of space counts. Also every bit of energy an instrument uses and heat it produces must be ...
18
votes
Why didn't JWST include any sensors capable of blue and green visible wavelengths
The mirror is made out of gold. Gold is an amazing reflector of anything past about 600 nm, some between 500 and 600 nm, but very little smaller than that. It works perfectly for the infrared nature ...
15
votes
Why didn't JWST include any sensors capable of blue and green visible wavelengths
It's not just a filter
The mission of the JWST is to image heavily redshifted light from objects that are moving quickly away from the telescope. Far away means long in the past, in this case, so we ...
14
votes
Accepted
Does NASA have any rocket options to replace ISS segments?
The main issue for American providers is that there is no real space tug available off the shelf. The Russians often used a modified propulsion module from Progress (Posik, Pirs, Prichal modules) ...
9
votes
What kind of hardware and software does the James Webb space telescope computer use?
You've asked 6 questions there, of which at least two seem unrelated to the title so I'm going to ignore them.
This document describes the "Integrated Science Instrument Module". The OS is ...
6
votes
Why didn't JWST include any sensors capable of blue and green visible wavelengths
I see a number of good reasons in the other answers, but I want to add this information about the use of dual detectors and the dichroic beam-splitter. NIRCAM has two separate electronic detectors ...
5
votes
Why didn't JWST include any sensors capable of blue and green visible wavelengths
The main reason is that, due to the nature of the mission, they are not needed (in most cases are actually useless), and adding them will just add unnecessary overhead to the mission in all aspects ...
5
votes
Is there any way to predict if the ISS will lose its signal or to know it directly?
The most common cause of loss of video feed from the ISS is due to a TDRS handover.
See this map below.
Note the large regions enclosed in light blue, green, and yellow. Those define the boundaries ...
3
votes
Do astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) actually use their legs?
Do astronauts use their legs in Space?
Yes, astronauts use their legs daily as they have to work out about 2 hours a day to combat bone loss and other negative health effects that microgravity has on ...
2
votes
How to calculate Earth to Sun distance given NASA DSCOVR j2000 coordinates
It looks like the sun_j2000_position is the Sun's position relative to Earth. So it is as simple as using the Pythagorean theorem: $ \sqrt{x^2+y^2+z^2} $ for those coordinates, which yeild about 151,...
2
votes
What is that black thing in center of every star in this JWST image?
Here's what I dug up re: the plausibility of Vorbis's suggestion of the "black sun" effect (where the reference voltage in a CMOS sensor gets distorted so much that the generated output of ...
2
votes
How were vibrations supposed to be handled in an Ares I?
This article reviews the vibration dampers considered. The previous answer didn't mention the LOX damper. As the linked article mentions, it channeled movements in the liquid oxygen. I believe the ...
2
votes
Why didn't JWST include any sensors capable of blue and green visible wavelengths
What’s disappointing, and what’s a major oversight?
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR): the ratio of desired information (signal) to undesired (background) detections
As part of scientific observation, ...
1
vote
Why didn't JWST include any sensors capable of blue and green visible wavelengths
The biggest reason is that we don't need a really good space based visible telescope. There are a number of much bigger visible light telescopes (on earth) that are much more effective at observing ...
1
vote
Why did NASA release JWST image of SMACS 0723 one day before the scheduled time?
Biden's remarks did not explicitly say why one image was previewed ahead of the others (or why this was the image chosen), but we can speculate.
First, NASA press events are not a mainstream outlet ...
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