WASHINGTON — A new space telescope will be named for James E. Webb, the administrator of NASA during the Apollo lunar exploration program, the space agency announced this week.
TRW, a Redondo Beach, Calif., firm, will be the lead contractor for the $824.8 million James Webb Telescope, NASA said. The orbiting astronomy observatory, once called the Next Generation Space Telescope, is scheduled for launch in 2010.
NASA said the craft will be rocketed 940,000 miles into space and parked at Lagrange Point 2, an area in space that is balanced between the gravity of the Earth and the Sun.
The craft will be shaded from sunlight by a tennis-court-size shield, enabling the telescope to maintain a temperature of about minus 370 degrees. This will increase the telescope's sensitivity to infrared, or heat, radiation from deep space.
The new telescope will have a primary light-collecting mirror of at least 20 feet in diameter, more than twice the eight-foot mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope. The larger mirror along with the orbital position of the craft will enable the new telescope to probe deeper into the universe than the Hubble. The Webb's telescope mirror will be segmented and folded during launch and during the three-month voyage to the Lagrange Point 2. Once there, engineers will send a signal commanding the mirror to unfold and snap into place.
There will be three principal instruments on board, all designed to gather images of the universe in the infrared parts of the light spectrum. Officials said this will enable the Webb to gather new information about how stars and galaxies formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning of the universe about 14 billion years ago. The earliest galaxies formed after the Big Bang are thought to be visible from Earth orbit only in the infrared.
The Webb will also be able to study the formation of planets and to search for dark matter, the mysterious, unseen mass that is thought to make up about 90 percent of the matter in the universe.
James E. Webb was NASA's second administrator, serving from Feb. 14, 1961, to Oct. 7, 1968. That period included NASA's early attempts to build rockets and to put men into space. By the time he left office, the space agency was on the brink of sending men to the moon, with the first landing, by Apollo 11, coming in July 1969, just months after his retirement. Webb also directed a vigorous space exploration program using robot craft to probe other planets.
Webb died in 1992 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Sean O'Keefe, NASA's current administrator, said that it was fitting to name the new telescope for Webb, who "took our nation on its first voyages of exploration, turning our imagination into reality.
"He laid the foundations at NASA for one of the most successful periods of astronomical discovery," O'Keefe said of Webb.
On the Net: James Webb Telescope: www.ngst.nasa.gov