The starting gun is ready to fire for the world's most advanced space telescope and the thousands of people who have worked on it over the decades.
The mammoth James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch on December 25 at 7:20 a.m. eastern time, after more than a quarter-century of planning, designing, building, waiting, and obsessively testing the most complex space observatory ever assembled.
Designing the main camera for NASA's new $10 billion space observatory turns out to be similar to that Tom Petty song. The most difficult thing is waiting. Marcia Rieke, an astronomer and regents' professor at the University of Arizona, began working on the James Webb Space Telescope in 1998, when it was still in its infancy. She has led the Near InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) development team since 2002, which will allow Webb to peek into the deepest reaches of the universe in pursuit of light made by galaxies more than 13.5 billion years ago. In 2013, Rieke and his team delivered the completed camera to NASA. Since then, they've been waiting for it to be launched into orbit.
“We knew we would deliver well before the project launched, but there were a few extra launch delays that none of us had counted on,” Rieke said recently from her office at UA’s Steward Observatory. “You just have to be patient.” Her long wait may finally end on Christmas morning.
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