There's one particular reason why I'm counting the days until March 2021: exoplanets.ĭon’t get me wrong, I love the bodies in our solar system, but there's something about the light of a different sun that captures my imagination. We'll be able to study some of the bodies in our own solar system in a new way, including Mars, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.īut those aren't why I'm dying for you to get up there and start doing your job. We'll finally be able to peer inside the Eagle Nebula's famous Pillars of Creation. Once you reach space, you’ll unfurl yourself in a complex, week-long sequence with little margin for error.Īnd once you're up there and fully in position, we're going to learn so much about the universe from the pictures and data you'll send back. Packing those innovations into a rocket was a masterstroke, too: When you (eventually) blast off from French Guyana, your huge mirror and your sunshield will be folded up inside an Ariane 5 rocket. Several new technologies had to be invented to make you work, including the new material for your sunshield and the software that'll keep you orbiting the L2 Lagrange point. I can't even wrap my mind around the feats of engineering that have gone into your construction. Your infrared telescope will be able to witness star formation even through dense clouds of gas, and you will detect objects so far away, their original ultraviolet glow has shifted down to infrared by the time it gets to us, billions of years and sextillions of miles later. You'll see things that nobody from Earth, and none of our telescopes, have ever seen before: the first light of the universe, the birth of stars, and gravity’s assembly of galaxies. But you’ll be hard at work, too: You'll hang there in a stable orbit, one million miles away from Earth at the L2 Lagrange point, as you gaze out into space. But I know all about taking a long time to get ready to go out-and when you finally make your appearance, you're going to be beautiful, with your 25-foot golden mirror and your five-layer sunshield. We've waited a long time for you your original target launch date was all the way back in 2007. When you finally launch in March 2021 (we hope), you're going to shine a light on where we came from and where we might end up living. This essay is an entry in our "Dear Spacecraft" series, where we ask writers, scientists, and astronomy enthusiasts to share why they feel personally connected to robotic space explorers.
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