Re:James Webb is fully deployed
by behnamoh on Saturday January 08, 2022 @08:05PM
(#29858632)
they could have sent a temporary camera along with the craft to take a picture of it at the final position and send back to earth.
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Re:James Webb is fully deployed
by michaelwilson on Saturday January 08, 2022 @09:03PM
(#29859069)
Sadly one of the the problems is, it's dark where it is. The mirror side is in complete darkness (because of the sunshield), and the sun side is blazingly bright (because of the reflective sunshield).
This is the unfortunate reality of space: The images we see from the Hubble, et al, are exposed for minutes if not hours, and processed to bring out colors invisible to the human eye. An astronaut flying to see the Webb, or one of many other "well known" astronomical landmarks would see either nothing or a faint smudge without a telescope or other enhancements.
The aforementioned NASA blog post goes into the many other reasons this wasn't practical.
Re:James Webb is fully deployed
by heavyset_go on Saturday January 08, 2022 @08:52PM
(#29858992)
Sounds like that would be expensive with little to no return when it comes to the goals of the mission.