VOA常速英语:詹姆斯·韦伯望远镜或2021年投入使用

The James Webb telescope is being prepped for launch in 2021 and it will change the way that NASA views the universe. James Webb is designed specifically to look into the infrared, and this is an area of the spectrum where we have looked before, but certainly never with anything as advanced as Webb, so the hope is that we’re really going to expand what we understand about the universe in this regime.
The infrared spectrum not only allows astronomers to see things the human eye can’t, but infrared waves are special, and that they don’t scatter as much as visible light does when passing through interstellar gas and dust, so the Webb telescope will see farther and better.

Webb is designed to observe the universe in the infrared, and by doing that you open up a tremendous amount of new science that we can do. Two of the extremes are looking, first of all, at the most distant galaxies in the universe. They’re light because of the effects of cosmological red shift. They are shifted all the way into the infrared, so we’re only really able to observe those galaxies by looking infrared.
It’s also just a much better telescope than Hubble which has been in orbit since 1990. It’s a much larger than Hubble, so it’s five times larger in area than Hubble. It’s also located a much better place to actually, put a telescope so well beyond the orbit of the earth and it’s how I again see fainter objects, and in the intervening time we’ve developed better instrumentation and better cameras.
And it’s just possible that the Webb telescope might be the tool that helps astronomers prove that we’re not alone in the universe. It’s not really what this is designed to do, but pile of Webb’s mission is to find quantum and to study their atmospheres. Now there’s possibilities that we might actually discover evidence or indirect evidence for life on these planets by looking at the chemistry in their atmospheres.
The telescope is scheduled to be launched in 2021 who will be deployed about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
Kevin Enix VOA news.