Nasa plan to hunt for extraterrestrial alien life using James Webb Space Telescope postponed

Nasa has once again postponed its plan to use an alien-hunting space telescope to search for traces of extraterrestrial life way out in deep space. It has announced another delay to the launch of its next-generation space telescope until at least 2020. Top officials said Tuesday that more time is needed to assemble and test the James Webb Space Telescope, which is considered a successor to the long-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

 It’s the latest in a series of delays for the telescope, dating back a decade. More recently, Webb was supposed to fly this year, but last fall NASA pushed the launch back to 2019. ‘Simply put, we have one shot to get this right before going into space,’ explained Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator of science.




For such a highly complex machine designed to ‘look at the universe in a way that we’ve never seen it,’ there can be no shortcuts, he stressed. The telescope will study planets orbiting other stars while peering back in time to the beginning of the cosmos. Some mistakes were made while preparing the telescope, which slowed work. At the same time, NASA underestimated the scale of the job, Zurbuchen said.

 Unlike Hubble, which was serviced regularly by space shuttle astronauts, Webb will orbit the sun at a point about 1 million miles from Earth, meaning it would unreachable if it broke down. Hubble lifted off in 1990 with a flawed mirror that blurred its vision, meaning spacewalking astronauts had to fly up and fix it in 1993.



‘You’ve heard this before, but it rings true for us. Really, failure is not an option,’ Zurbuchen told reporters in a teleconference. Nasa and its partner, the European Space Agency, will firm up a new launch date, now tentatively targeted for May 2020 from French Guiana. An independent review board is being formed to look into the remaining work and feasible launch dates. Once a date is actually set, NASA said it will provide a new cost estimate. Officials acknowledge the cost may exceed the $8 billion development cap set by Congress. NASA already has poured $7.3 billion into the telescope, said Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot. He promised Congress would receive a detailed report on schedule and cost this summer.

The telescope is named after the NASA administrator who oversaw the Mercury and Gemini programs and development of the Apollo moon missions. All its parts are now at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach, California. The two halves of the 13,500-pound (6,100-kilogram) observatory still must be joined and the entire structure tested. ‘Extensive testing is the only way to ensure that the mission will succeed with high confidence,’ Zurbuchen said.