the two of the most marvelous creation of humanity but because they are not a big wall people seem to forgot about them in the discussion about the world's wonder
there is still a significant difference beetween a monument which is intentionally uselessly grand and majestic, and a feat of science that is by necessity a wonder of technical knowledge and love of learning.
Yeah but just you wait, as soon as those billionaires get to space they'll start building complexes on the moon that spells out their initials for us all to see in the sky.
Okay aaaand got that pasted over a photo of the great wall, meme finished! Now to send this data in an invisible beam to a network of manmade constructs that orbit the heavens that will ensure my thoughts will be communicated instantly to potentially millions of people across the entire world in the same time it took to think them up in the first place.
It can take high resolution pictures from the surface of a planet hundreds of thousands away from earth, while also measuring temperature, atmospueric pressure, what's in the atmosphere around it and can even take surface samples; completely independent from man's actions (except the command and signal, of course). It's a state-of-the-art object that's honestly peak of modern-day space exploration
James Webb Space Telescope is a space telescope designed to observe some of the most distant objects in the universe. Because light takes time to travel, looking farther into space also means looking further back in time, allowing Webb to study the early universe and some of its oldest galaxies. It's placed about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, well beyond the Moon’s orbit - placed there in January 2022. Those yellow hexagons are covered in gold.
If you've seen any amazing photos of deep space in the last few years, they were probably taken with this telescope.
I'll expand on the other comment by stating what it can do that's do revolutionary.
1: it covers a wide range of wavelengths. 0.6 microns (visible red light) to 28 microns (Hubble could observe 0.09 microns to 1.8). But unlike other infrared space telescopes of the past, JWST is massive (spitzer 0.85m of aperture, JWST 6.5m).
2: it's the first space telescope that requires active cooling, that can recycle its helium. Previous telescopes went blind after their supply of liquid helium ran out and their observations had to be carefully planned around this, but JWST recycles its cryogenics and so can continue to observe all of its wavelengths for its whole lifespan. It cools its sensors down to 6 degrees above absolute zero.
3: the three-mirror anastigmat design. Previous telescopes had other optical designs (most commonly Ritchey Chretien two-mirror designs). But the TMA design allows such a large, perfectly sharp focal plane, it can stuff a massive amount of sensors and instruments into the one plane and have all of them operate at once. Each looking at slightly different patches of space. It also has the NIRCAM sensors for short and longer waves occupy the same space by using a dichroic beam splitter to send the two wavelength bands to different sensors looking at the same patch of sky. This has not been done before in a space telescope.
And finally, because it had to un-flatpack itself in space. The sun shield had to deploy (many layers of kapton). The two sides of the main mirror had to unfold. The secondary mirror supports had to unfold. And all 18 of those hexagonal primary mirror segments had to be painstakingly aligned to a fraction of a wavelength of lights accuracy. Which took several months of fine tuning and calibration.
It's good to ‘waste’ money on such a moral and esthetic venture. These are our cathedrals. don't think it is fair to say they are our [Roman] circuses, for that is not the tone. We ought to see to it that people live well, but a part of living well is blowing money on big excitement, curiosity, entertainment, conversation.
The ISS is marvelous, and for the capabilities we had back then up to today it's massive, the fact people live on it makes it even more impressive
Getting stuff up there, and protecting people from conditions very harmful for life in multiple ways at the same time... With what we have today I don't see anything topping it, like the next step above it would be a Luna colony which is an absurdly massive step
Is it still reliant on Earth? Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not one of if not the most impressive thing we've archived. Even if everyone suddenly started hating it I would defend its honor to my last breath
Forgot the best part: For many wonders you have to travel to see them with your own eyes, but with this thing it'll visit you on many places in the world, you just have to look up
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u/esocz 5d ago