The world’s most powerful telescope unfurled its final mirror today as it sped away to its final destination one million miles from earth. NASA completed the final step of the Webb telescope’s difficult two-week initiation process Saturday, unfolding the final 21-foot piece: its ‘golden eye.’ NPR science correspondent Joe Palca joins Hari Sreenivasan to explain more about the telescope, its design, and its purpose.
Summary
- But if you look through an infrared telescope, oh yes, there I see a star or a galaxy.
- The final thing I’ll say about what they’re going to find is, they don’t know.
- They’re going to come up with interesting observations, and I was saying the first example of that is Galileo.
- He didn’t know what he was going to find.
- He didn’t build the telescope because he wanted to know if there were moons around Jupiter.