Based on a letter to my children after their Christmas visit, 2021.
One of my grandsons, age 9, said he had not heard of the James Web Space Telescope (JWST), which is nothing less than humanity’s greatest astronomy project ever. It will “see” back to the earliest light the universe produced, 13.4 billion years ago. It was launched Christmas day, and will be in place before the end of January. I'm surprised that the kids’ teachers aren’t helping even little kids to about this landmark event.
If you want to study it with your kids or grandkids or kid friends, here are some links to info about progress towards its final working location. It is currently (2022/01/07) well into its “deployment” (unfolding) steps and about two weeks from taking up its final orbit position about 1 million miles from Earth. (Moon is ‘only' 1/4 million miles away.)
1) Short animation of full unfolding after launch and release from ship body:
2) Where is it now?
Here you can track its progress and see short animations with explanations of what’s happening each day.
Easy way to look at individual steps in deployment:
Nice article on the complex orbit once it's in place:
Very non-intuitive orbit. In a sense, it’s orbiting around a point in space, not around another mass. It can do that because of the shape of space that Sun and Earth combine to produce at what are called Lagrange points. These points in space act like massive bodies —— in a way.
This video shows the shape of space that guides this complicated movement:
If the children get really curious about it, I’d be happy to give each family a Zoom meeting and answer questions about these videos.
Then we could get into what the JWST might tell us. Serious early-universe cosmology.
