NASA says Webb’s excess fuel likely to extend its lifetime expectations

Re:NASA says Webb’s excess fuel likely to extend its lifetim... by nzach on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @11:26AM (#29893558)

JWST will be so far away from earth that is unlikely any human will ever get near him. Also, Hubble was designed to be serviceable during its lifetime. This isn't the case for JWST.

Maybe technology will develop enough to allow us to send drones to work on JWST, but today this is still just a dream.

PS: I'm just a random code monkey on the internet, so take these comments with a grain of salt.

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Re:NASA says Webb’s excess fuel likely to extend its lifetim... by bpodgursky on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @11:29AM (#29893615)

20 years is a long time, and space is moving fast these days. I wouldn't bet on it not being serviced (although I do agree that we'll have something better by then).

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Re:NASA says Webb’s excess fuel likely to extend its lifetim... by jagger27 on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @11:49AM (#29893964)

If I were to bet on something it would be a simpler but bigger design that takes advantage of Starship’s much wider fairing.

Let’s say we wanted a constellation of telescopes to do full sky surveys of small objects in our system for asteroid detection. Do those need to be kept at near absolute zero to be effective at that task?

Webb has a specific mission of imaging deeply redshifted space. I would hope in 20 years we’ll be able to launch bigger, simpler, and cheaper designs for more “pedestrian” missions.

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