
We have some bad news: Maryland’s time with NASA’s newest universe-probing telescope is almost up.
We have some bad news: Maryland’s time with NASA’s newest universe-probing telescope is almost up.
NASA’s massively powerful James Webb Space Telescope will one day bring us infrared images of the births of distant galaxies, while orbiting beyond the Earth’s moon at a temperature near absolute zero. But that’s still 8.7 billion dollars and several years away. While we wait, a full-scale replica will be constructed and installed this month in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, as a free attraction for a national science center conference.
The contractor Northrop Grumman is tasked with erecting a totally non-functioning, but outwardly identical version of a landmark four-story telescope that won’t be completed for years. Isn’t that weird? Let’s say you were beginning construction on a house, and other people in your neighborhood were so psyched about it that they hired their own construction team to build a completely non-operational 1:1 scale model of it. Wouldn’t you feel strange?
And, I hate to bring this up, but what if the original is never finished? How weird will our model be then?