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 anonymousab on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @11:56AM (#29894071)

The scale and intensity of the problem is much bigger though.

This one is hundreds to thousands of times further out than any of those satellites, for instance. It also has a far longer lifetime compared to the average, even before this news. Four times the distance of the moon from Earth. There's no luxury of being able to repair, service and refuel such a thing without approaching or exceeding the costs of just making a new, better one with the learnings and savings from before.

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Re:NASA says Webb’s excess fuel likely to extend its lifetim... by shagie on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @12:00PM (#29894138)

The site https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.htm... is neat. Change the scale from Time to Distance to get an idea of how far out it is.

(edit - the "earth moon" distance isn't to scale with respect to planetary diameters... the distance from the earth to the moon is about the same as the sum of all the diameters of all the planets - that's a long way itself)

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