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" The James Webb Space Telescope might be grounded years before it ever approaches liftoff. This month, a House of Representatives subcommittee introduced a bill that would eliminate funding for the program. Now the fate of NASA&amp;#039;s next great telescope-to-be rests with rests with the arcane procedures of the Congressional budget process.  Heidi Hammel from the Space Science Institute, has been working on the project since 2003 and planned to continue working on it beyond the proposed launch date of 2018. &amp;quot;The JWST is the next frontier instrument for astronomy and astrophysics,&amp;quot; she says. Hammel and many other astronomers and astrophysicists who have pinned their hopes for future research on the telescope&amp;#039;s eventual launch now face the prospect of that launch never happening.  The Telescope Named for NASA&amp;#039;s second administrator, the James Webb telescope is often called the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. But rather than visible light, which Hubble uses, JWST would image in infrared, picking up on distant heat signatures of celestial bodies from across the universe. Infrared telescopes can peer deep into history, because the light from the oldest, most distant reaches of the universe becomes stretched out as the universe expands, shifting the light signatures from the visible light spectrum into infrared, according to Marcia Rieke, an astronomer in charge of the James Webb Space Telescope&amp;#039;s infrared camera. With infrared observations, the instruments must be kept very cold to avoid interfering with the incoming infrared rays. &amp;quot;The Hubble Space Telescope simply can&amp;#039;t go far enough into the infrared because it is a warm telescope,&amp;quot; Rieke says. But rather than orbiting the Earth as Hubble does, JWST would travel the second Lagrange point (L2), an area nearly a million miles from Earth where the gravitational forces of Earth and the sun are balanced. The JWST would have the largest primary mirror of any space telescope in use today, made of 18 hexagonal beryllium segments and coated with gold. On June 30, NASA announced that polishing the mirrors had been completed, marking a huge milestone in the project. But with a 6-1/2-meter wide mirror and sun shields the size of tennis courts, the telescope can&amp;#039;t fit inside the delivery rocket (a French Ariane 5) preassembled. Instead, the telescope must be made to deploy in space, unfolding carefully during its 100-day journey to L2. Researchers from around the world have extraordinarily high hopes for the capabilities of the telescope. &amp;quot;The James Webb is kind of your Swiss Army Knife of telescopes&amp;quot; John Grunsfeld says. Grunsfeld is currently the deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which coordinated all the research projects for Hubble and would do so for JWST. Researchers like Grunsfeld hope to use the JWST to peer into the distant past, seeing some of the stars and galaxies that formed soon after the big bang. Many researchers hope to use the telescope to observe exoplanets more closely, potentially determining if they have water or oxygen in their atmospheres. The Trouble But JWST has been hampered by delays and funding problems; once scheduled to launch in 2014 for a cost around $1 billion, the telescope&amp;#039;s schedule was recently revised to 2018, and its cost estimated at more like $6 billion. Last year, Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland commissioned an independent panel to review why JWST was taking so long and costing so much. The report found that while the technology and hardware were on track, poor budgeting and management were derailing progress. The report made JWST a target for the House Appropriations Committee, which is seeking to cut spending. In a press release issued July 7 the appropriations subcommittee said, &amp;quot;The bill . . . terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.&amp;quot; During a mark-up session on July 13, Rep. Adam Schiff of California proposed reinstating some funding to the program, but the amendment was promptly voted down. With so much future science tied up in JWST, the idea of killing the telescope has sent some researchers reeling a bit. &amp;quot;I think it will be demoralizing,&amp;quot; Grunsfeld says. &amp;quot;Making an example of it is kind of like beating your dog to improve its behavior.&amp;quot; Hammel says astronomy research in the United States and around the world would be dealt a serious blow if the telescope dies: &amp;quot;The universe won&amp;#039;t stop going, but we won&amp;#039;t know what its doing.&amp;quot; The telescope&amp;#039;s woes tie directly into the other high-profile debate over NASA&amp;#039;s future: the end of the space shuttle and lack of a new vehicle capable of traveling to orbit. In 2009, Grunsfeld, a former astronaut, flew on the space shuttle&amp;#039;s final servicing mission to Hubble. But with no more shuttle flights, NASA couldn&amp;#039;t extend the 21-year-old Hubble to try to compensate for the loss of JWST even if it wanted to. &amp;quot;The Hubble&amp;#039;s lifetime is limited,&amp;quot; Hammel says. Other space telescopes exist, including the infrared Herschel telescope, but most are designed to gather only one type of data; they don&amp;#039;t have an array of capabilities like the Webb would have. The End? Projects like the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope take a long time to come to fruition for a reason, Hammel says. Often engineers must fabricate entirely new technologies, which can take unforeseeable amounts of money and time. Hubble famously suffered through delays and cost overruns before it became the smashing success we know today. &amp;quot;You have to have a lot of patience when you work on a program like this,&amp;quot; Hammel says. &amp;quot;Unfortunately, Congress works on a yearly cycle.&amp;quot; The James Webb telescope&amp;#039;s fate is not sealed. For funding to be cut, the bill would have to be accepted by both the House of Representatives and the Senate as is, and there is some hope that funding could be restored in future versions of the bill. In fact, Mikulski\u2014who commissioned the initial review of JWST&amp;#039;s budget woes\u2014has emerged as a potential champion for the project in the Senate. She issued a statement on June 7 after the House subcommittee decided to cancel the project, calling the decision a &amp;quot;shortsighted and misguided move.&amp;quot; With nothing set in stone and the final budget decision still months away, the scientists connected to the telescope aren&amp;#039;t losing hope. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re working full steam ahead to execute a really great telescope&amp;quot; Grunsfeld says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s doing these ambitious space programs that allows us to grow.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/telescopes/a12604/if-congress-cancels-hubbles-successor-what-then/>