/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15722441
In 1995 when the project was first started, JWST, then known as NGST (next generation space telescope), was approved for a budget of $500 million, its was to be an 8m telescope to be launched in 2007.
NGST was part of NASA's "better, faster, cheaper" space based astronomy program, which was developed after the disappointing delays, failures and exorbitant cost overruns of projects like the Hubble space telescope. The idea that NGST could be launched for a small fraction of what HST had costed had to do with NGST's light weight design using a thin metal mirror rather than the heavy traditional mirror that had been launched in HST. Unfortunately the people who had proposed the NGST design had overestimated their own competence by several orders of magnitude and they were unable to deliver what they had offered. This should have been expected by the honchos at NASA because the guy who fucked up the NICMOS camera design for HST, Rodger Thompson of the University of Arizona, was part of the team that designed the NGST proposal. Thompson's problems with NICMOS arose because he couldn't do basic math and didn't understand thermodynamics, this was revealed whenever he tried to teach a class, even undergrads were able to recognize Thompson's lack of ability because Thompson would often fail badly when trying to demonstrate problems on the whiteboard in class and then try to save face by inventing constants of integration on the spot to complete problems and then quickly erase the board and change the subject.

>>15218060
JWST's theoretical best performance in terms of optical resolution is nearly identical to HST's, its basic optics to figure that, JWST's mirror is almost 3x wider than HST's and JWST operates in a frequency range about 3x larger than HST. However JWST has large sample size because of the larger mirror, a better signal to noise ratio and it doesn't have HST's fucked up optics, but JWST has the terrible diffraction pattern to deal with. Neither telescope performs up to anywhere near what the astronomers were daydreaming about when the projects got started. JWST was started as the "Next Generation Space Telescope", the original $500 million plan was for an 8m single piece round mirror like HST's, but with good optics, if they would have pull that off then they would have had a substantial optical gain over HST because HST is no diffraction limited at it's highest frequencies, it is limited by it's malformed optics.

>>15078000
Its the same issue, JWST (formerly known as NGST) doesn't perform as promised, not even close. In order to hide their failure to live up to the promises that got them the tens of billions to build and launch JWST, they are covering up the data the same way that they did with HST when it was first launched.
picrel is the promised performance of JWST…

>>14865079
because JWST has shitty optics.
when the program was launched in the mid 1990s, it was originally planned as an 8m telescope with high quality, round, fully symmetrical optics of a similar grade to what HST was capable of, but with 3x better angular resolution due to the larger optics.
all that was supposed to have cost only $500 million and the were promising to launch it by 2007.
instead they launched in 2022, 13 years late and overran their budget by more than 3000%, all while delivering a telescope with poorly designed optics and only a small fraction of the promised optical performance.
asymmetrical, noncircular optics only function well in a schiefspiegler arrangement, anyone who has studied basic telescope optics could've told them that the hebrew hexagram would fail, unfortunately they did not include those people in the design process, they only included astronomers and nasa people.

>>14822810
no, it's angular resolution is too poor for that use. jwst has roughly the same ability to resolve detail as hst. that was not the original plan for jwst, it was supposed to have been a lot better than it is, but sadly it is not, due to the incompetence of the people involved.

>>14826063
People talk a lot about JWST being 15 years behind schedule and it's massive, unwarranted budget overruns. Few people also mention that JWST missed failed badly in attempting to meet it's initially intended, promised optical performance. A large part of the failure to perform comes from the fact that JWST was initially promised to be an 8m scope rather than 6.5m, the mirror which was launched is only half as large as what was promised when they got the go-ahead more than a quarter of a century ago.

>>14769619
not forgotten, intentionally ignored. people are repulsed by the cringe, nobody wants to be associated with jwst, even the people who got the project started are disavowing responsibility for it, because the project was a wasteful failure. missed target launch date by a decade and a half, more than 3000% over budget, delivered only a small percentage of the initially promised capabilities and on top of all that, the pictures look like shit because of the low quality optics employed. jwst is a very unsettling reminder of nasa's rapidly declining technical and scientific capabilities.

>>14711670
>Still, can you really trust anything from a group of people willing to fake images for research money?
look at how awesome JWST is gonna be bro, i only need $500 million, the telescope will be ready in 12 years bro, i promise. 8 meter mirror minimum, spotless optics, its a bargain, bro.

Why is JWST's actual performance so much worse than the performance that the scientists were promising back when the project got started?
Has telescope technology really gotten to be that much worse since the 1990s when the scientists were making their promises?