The Final Frontier is about to Become a Bit Less Mysterious

Nicholas Levi, Staff Reporter

BROOKLYN – Even now, in 2016, there is so little known about the infinite universe our planet happens to inhabit. Humanity as a species has always been fascinated with what lies beyond our skies. In such a little amount of time we have made such great progress on our quest to discover our place in the cosmos. We’ve grown and learned at an exponential rate, creating new technologies and using them to discover more, further beyond anything we could ever hope to reach in our lifetime. But soon we’ll be launching into a whole new era of discovery. The James Webb Space Telescope will be the most advanced telescope ever created and will let us see further beyond than anything we have ever seen before.

Telescopes have been around since 1608 when Hans Lippershey invented the first telescope with 3x magnification (space.com) and for 382 years the concept behind them stayed largely the same. In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope became the most advanced telescope ever made and thE first to be shot into orbit around Earth. Hubble, according to NASA, has seen over 3,000 new galaxies and was a main part in discovering the mysterious force of dark energy. But in October of 2018 The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be launched.
The JWST will become NASA’s newest and most powerful telescope, and the successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope. According to NASA, “JWST will be able to see right through and into massive clouds of dust […] where stars and planetary systems are being born[,] will tell us more about the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, and perhaps even find the building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe[, and] will be a powerful time machine with infrared vision that will peer back over 13.5 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies forming out of the darkness of the early universe.”

Famous astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, described The James Webb Space Telescope as having “the power to move human knowledge forward in ways we can only imagine.”