The James Webb Space Telecope and Lisa Dang

Dec 2021: In the past 30 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has delivered incredible observations that shaped modern astronomy. During the time of the Hubble launch, astronomers had already been thinking about its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST turned out to be the most complex space telescope ever built: an infrared telescope, shielded from thermal radiation, with a primary mirror that is 6.5 metres in diameter, and made up of 18 hexagonal pieces, each made of beryllium thinly coated with gold, and each individually adjustable putting the honeycomb-shaped surface area of the mirror at 25 square metres, about six times that of the Hubble telescope. Now, after three decades, this long-awaited observatory is finally launching to space on December 24th, 2021 at 7:20 AM EST, all the way to L2, the Sun-Earth's second Lagrange point. Among many things, JWST will take us right up at the edge of the observable universe by looking at the earliest galaxies and will allow us to better understand our Solar Neighborhood by characterizing the atmosphere of all kinds of exoplanets! Excitingly, our graduate student, Lisa Dang, will be amongst the first principal investigators to use the JWST - Lisa and her team were awarded time on JWST to map the atmosphere and surface of a lava planet, K2-141b.