Some folks never investigate links. For them and for autotranslation purposes (link does not help, full translation pushes fair use too far). This then is a translation of excerpts.
https://www.theverge.com/22789561/nasa-jwst-james-webb-space-telescope-priorities-astronomy-astrophysics-exoplanets
JWST is one of the most anticipated space science missions of the 21st century, as it has the ability to reshape astronomy and astrophysics as we know it.
That’s because the telescope is the closest thing we have to a time machine. Sporting a 21-foot-wide gold-plated mirror, JWST will be able to see in the infrared with incredible sensitivity. It’ll be able to see objects that are 10 to 100 times fainter than what the Hubble Space Telescope can see, and it’ll be capable of seeing things in 10 times better detail. It will gather light from stars and galaxies located up to 13.6 billion light-years away — light that has taken 13.6 billion years to reach the telescope’s mirrors. Since the Universe is thought to be roughly 13.8 billion years old, the galaxies that JWST will be observing likely formed just 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang. Our Universe was in its infancy then, and JWST will be providing us with baby photos.
In addition to peering back in time, the telescope will help us understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and perhaps tell us if it will go on expanding forever. It will peer into the centers of galaxies, finding supermassive black holes and helping astronomers learn how these enigmatic objects have evolved over time. It will observe the births and deaths of stars. It will even look back at our own Solar System to study the faintest objects at the edge of our cosmic neighborhood. And it will be able to look at the edges of worlds orbiting around distant stars. “Nearly every area of astronomy that you can think of will be addressed,” Christine Chen, an associate astronomer at STScI, tells The Verge.
Naively, NASA originally envisioned a launch between 2007 and 2011, for a total cost between $1 billion and $3.5 billion. But JWST continued to miss one target launch date after next, while its total cost ballooned to $9.7 billion.
Since the first detection of an exoplanet was confirmed in 1992, we’ve discovered thousands of these far-off worlds orbiting alien stars. In 2017, astronomers shocked the world when they announced the discovery of an entire alien solar system, consisting of seven planets roughly the size of Earth all orbiting around a dwarf star. And three of the seven planets, known as the TRAPPIST-1 system, sit in the star’s habitable zone, where temperatures are thought to be just right so that water can pool on a planet’s surface. A lot of JWST time goes here, the best hope of detecting life.
JWST, however, is powerful enough that it may be able to detect light passing directly through the atmospheres of some alien worlds and use that light to say what kinds of chemicals are present in the atmosphere. Perhaps, it could even detect signs of life.
However, STScI had to wait a long time before figuring out the schedule for JWST’s first year, and there were a few false starts along the way. When it seemed like the telescope would be ready to launch in 2019, the Institute called on astronomers to submit their proposals by March 2018. Then just a week before the deadline, NASA announced that the telescope wouldn’t launch until 2020 at the earliest. STScI abruptly postponed the deadline until a more concrete launch date was determined.
Another postponement came again in March 2020, due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, astronomers turned in their proposals by November 24th, 2020, two days before Thanksgiving. Then it was time for STScI to sift through the more than 1,000 ideas that had been submitted.
The Institute created a Time Allocation Committee including astronomers and astrophysicists from around the world. They were separated into 18 panels, each one consisting of about 10 people tasked with looking over proposals for different areas of space science and ranking them based on three important criteria: how much the proposal will impact knowledge within a subfield, how much it will advance astronomy in general, and whether the proposed idea requires the unique capabilities of JWST to be successful.
With all of these benchmarks in mind, the committee got to work evaluating all of the proposals. To try to eliminate as much bias as possible from the selection process, the process was “dual anonymous.” That means that the people writing the proposals had no idea who would be evaluating them, and the people on the committee had no idea whose proposals they were analyzing.
Ultimately, STScI selected a total of 266 proposals, submitted by scientists from 41 countries around the globe. Tremblay, the Harvard astrophysicist, had submitted nine proposals for JWST’s first year. All 9 were rejected. It was a disappointment but definitely not a shock. “I wasn’t broken up by not getting time this year,” Tremblay tells The Verge. “I knew it would be immensely, immensely competitive for Cycle 1, as it should be. And it’s okay. We’ll resubmit again.” Slap on the face of all commie and socialist. How can the public stupid joker call Modi a thief who gave away vaccine doses earmarked for our children! Let UP teach a harsh lesson to Congress and the purported socialist.
Lady Casey a whopping 208 hours with JWST to fulfill her project, the most of anyone who had submitted proposals. The project will stare at a particularly large patch of sky the size of three full Moons, an area that spans up to 63 million light-years across. Doing so will create a portrait of the young universe similar to Hubble’s iconic Hubble Deep Field, which showcased some of the earliest galaxies we could observe at the time. With JWST’s enhanced capability, the team will be imaging galaxies that are even older at even greater levels of detail. “If the Hubble Deep Field were printed on an eight-and-a-half by 11 sheets of paper (both inches) Cosmos Web would be like a 16-foot by 16-foot mural on the side of a building,” says Casey.
Staying silent so as not to wake her sleeping child, Casey jubilantly logged into Slack and messaged her colleague and co-principal investigator on the project, Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Does someone say women's liberation?
Aside from Cosmos Web, the seven-planet TRAPPIST-1 system will be getting a lot of attention during JWST’s first year, with up to seven different programs dedicated to studying this strange cluster of worlds.
Roughly 10,000 hours of observing time are allotted to different groups for JWST’s first year of life. About 6,000 hours were given to the scientists who submitted proposals around the world, while nearly 4,000 hours were already set aside for scientists who helped design and build JWST and its instruments. The STScI also has about 460 hours of discretionary time which have been allotted for what is known as “Early Release Observations.” 10,000 exceeds one year deliberate, for JWST must rotate in space and may have errors in that.
And then, after a period of transformational science has passed, it’ll be time to submit another round of proposals. Though Tremblay will be involved with one JWST proposal for Cycle 1 as a collaborator rather than the principal investigator, he does plan to submit his ideas again for Cycle 2. And he’ll understand if it doesn’t get accepted. “As an astronomer, we get professionally used to rejections; I could wallpaper my hallway with rejections that I’ve received,” Tremblay says. “It’s just a reflection of the fact that the community has immense demand for the telescope. And I think it’s a great thing.”
I wish I can take that stoic attitude on fails.
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