The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is preparing to launch its best telescope yet! This special telescope will gaze at the stars through the lense of a golden mirror. The golden mirror is not a single piece, but is a collection of 18 segments made up of beryllium, a rare metal that is strong and lightweight, and is coated with a very thin layer of pure gold for maximum reflectivity. Overall, it spans 21 feet across.

In an email interview, Lee Feinberg, the Optical Telescope Element Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA, stated that “A mirror this large has never before been launched into space.” This $8.8 billion telescope project is expected to launch in 2020, and will ultimately offer astronomers a wide view of the cosmos. Feinberg continued by saying that “Webb will solve mysteries of our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.”

The Webb was created to be a more capable successor to the Hubble Space Telescope which was launched in 1990. Unlike the Hubble, which orbits the Earth at a span of about 340 miles of altitude, the Webb will be sent almost a million miles into space, aimed to be at a specific location called “L2.” L2 is one of five so-called Lagrange points, or specific areas of stability in which gravity from the Earth and the Sun balances out. Because of this, putting an object in L2 will allow the object to be kept in a fixed position close to the two celestial bodies. The telescope will therefore ride through space without the need for engines or propulsion.

Through infrared radiation not by visible light, James Webb will be able to see deeper into space when looking at the universe. This indicates that the mirror itself will need to be super cold, in order to avoid emitting any heat that could interfere with its own observations. Feinberg states that “Because warm objects give off infrared light, or heat, if Webb’s mirror was the same temperature as Hubble’s, the faint infrared light from distant galaxies would be lost in the infrared glow of the mirror.”

In order to protect itself from the Sun’s heat, the mirror will sit on a 70-foot sunshield which will be as long as a tennis court and is made of a special heat-resistant type of material. It looks like a giant kite and will ultimately keep the mirror nearly three times colder than the coldest temperature ever recorded on the Earth. Overall, one can look forward to seeing the new golden space telescope!