Adventures in space have entered a whole new dimension, way beyond billionaires playing with their Dinky toys.
The James Webb Space Telescope launch on Christmas Day from Kourou spaceport in French Guiana marks a milestone in space exploration.
The $10bn (about R155bn) spyglass, the biggest space telescope ever, will look at every phase of cosmic history, including the first glows after the big bang that created our universe.
It’s mind-boggling stuff that will answer questions about our own solar system and investigate faint signals from the first galaxies formed 13.5-billion years ago.
The Webb is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble telescope, which is now 31 years old and ready to enjoy retirement in the galactic rocking chair.
Webb will do similar science to Hubble but with next-generation technologies that allow it to see deeper into the cosmos and, therefore, further back in time.
With Webb’s capabilities, researchers should be able to get four times closer to the big bang than the Hubble. Its flight to orbit on December 25 lasted just under half-an-hour, with a signal confirming a successful outcome picked up by a ground antenna at Malindi in Kenya.
We're going to be entering a whole new regime of astrophysics, a new frontier.
— Heidi Hammel, planetary astronomer
“We're going to be entering a whole new regime of astrophysics, a new frontier; and that is what gets so many of us excited about the James Webb Space Telescope,” Heidi Hammel, a planetary astronomer and an interdisciplinary scientist, told the BBC.
Wait, there’s more.
Nasa announced in December that for the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the sun. Nasa’s Parker solar probe has flown through the sun’s upper atmosphere — the corona — and sampled particles and magnetic fields there.
This historic milestone occurred in April last year, but the analysis of data confirmed it in December. It remained in the corona for five hours and withstood temperatures of 1,300C.
The spacecraft is the fastest man-made object ever, covering 1-million kilometres in two hours.
“Just as landing on the moon allowed scientists to understand how it was formed, touching the sun is a gigantic stride for humanity to help us uncover critical information about our closest star and its influence on the solar system,” said Nicola Fox, the director of Nasa’s heliophysics science division.
Nasa is also playing a galactic Muhammad Ali, going toe-to-toe with asteroids.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) spacecraft, launched in November, is on a mission to alter an asteroid’s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future.
Its mission is to send the asteroid off course with a knockout. The 540kg, refrigerator-size spacecraft will trek around the sun and slam into a small asteroid named Dimorphos at 24,000km/h next year.
If the mission succeeds, it could demonstrate humanity’s ability to punch a potentially hazardous asteroid away from Earth.
“We’re doing this work and testing this Dart capability before we need it,” Lindley Johnson, Nasa’s chief of planetary defence, said. “We don’t want to be flying an untested capability when we’re trying to save a population on the Earth’s surface.”
As a Nasa aerospace engineer joked, dinosaurs would have wanted this technical capability.
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