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What do astronomers eat for breakfast the day their $10 billion telescope is launched into space? nails.

“You’ve been working for years and everything is going up in a cloud of smoke,” said Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona.

Dr. Rieke admits that his fingers will cross as he prepares for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope on the morning of December 24. He has been working for 20 years to design and build an ultra-sensitive infrared camera that will live on a spaceship. Webb is the lauded larger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers expect it to break through a dark veil of ignorance and assumptions about the early days of the universe, allowing them to spy on nearby exoplanets.

After $10 billion and years of delays, the telescope is scheduled to finally make its way from a European launch site in French Guiana to a point a million miles on the other side of the moon. (Late Tuesday, NASA delayed the launch by at least two days).

An informal and completely unscientific survey of randomly selected astronomers has revealed that a community sitting on the edge of their seats is nervous, proud and grateful for the team that developed, built and tested the new telescope over the past quarter century.

“I will almost certainly be watching the flange and be horrified the entire time,” said Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, professor of physics and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire.

And there is much to worry about. The Ariane 5 rocket carrying the spacecraft rarely failed to get its payloads into orbit. But even if it survives launch, the telescope will still have a long way to go.

Over the next month, it will have to perform a series of maneuvers with 344 “points of single failure” to open its large gold mirror and deploy five thin giant plastic sunscreens that will keep the telescope and its instruments out in the cold. and dark. Engineers and astronomers call this interval six months of high anxiety because there is no possibility of any human or robotic intervention or rescue if something goes wrong.

But if all these steps are successful, it could change everything astronomers see through that telescope. They hope to detect the first stars and galaxies emerging from primordial fog when the universe was only 100 million years old, in short, the first steps from the big bang toward the cozy light show we experience today.

“Given the entire astronomy community, the expected far-reaching science returns and the potential for exploration, there’s a volume in the game,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale. “We are all intellectually and emotionally invested.”

However, the telescope was bitten by the snake during its long development due to cost overruns and expensive accidents that contributed to the normal perception of rocket launches.

Michael Turner, cosmologist at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles and former president of the American Physical Society, described the combination of “excitement and terror” he expected to feel during the launch.

Dr. “The next decade of astronomy and astrophysics builds on the success of JW,” Turner said, referring to the James Webb Space Telescope. “There’s also the prestige and leadership of the United States in space and science. It’s a heavy burden to carry, but it’s wonderful. We know how to do things.”

This view was echoed by Martin Rees of Cambridge University and Astronomer Royal For British royal families.

“Any failure of JWST would be disastrous for NASA,” he wrote in an email. “But if the failure involved a mechanical procedure – opening a blind or opening parts of a mirror – that would be a mega-catastrophic and embarrassing PR disaster. It’s because it involves the failure of something seemingly ‘simple’ that anyone can understand.”

Using Webb to probe the origin of supermassive black holes, Dr. “I try to be Zen and I don’t imagine disastrous results,” said Natarajan.

But in identifying the risks, he compared the telescope to other milestones in human history.

“Whether it’s the temples of Mahabalipuram, the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China or the Sistine Chapel, all of the extraordinary enduring achievements of human hands and minds have taken time and expense,” he said. “I truly see JWST as such a monument to our time.”

When asked how nervous he was, Alan Dressler of Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, chair of a committee that spearheaded the Webb project 25 years ago, answered with his own question.

“When you know someone is going to have critical surgery, do you sit down and chat about ‘what if it fails’?” he wrote. He added that his colleagues “know that there is no certainty here, and that it is not in any of us’s interest to ponder over this.”

Another astronomer involved with this project from the very beginning, Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an email that he was optimistic about the launch, despite his reputation as a “glass half empty” guy. .

“The deliveries are complex but in my view everything humanly possible has been done!” He wrote. While there were surprises in the telescope’s deployment, he said, “he didn’t expect them to be big or the mission to be over — not at all.”

Other respondents to my survey also took refuge from their tensions to the skill and dedication of their colleagues.

Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for his observations of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, said he was “in his right mind, trusting that really smart people are working really hard to get things right.”

This notion was supported by Tod Lauer, an astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, who was found to have an amorphous mirror that was intense when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and now requires repair visits by astronauts. retired space shuttle. He said his feelings about the upcoming launch are all about the engineers and technicians who built the Webb telescope.

“You very quickly respect the team nature of doing anything in space and your reliance on scientists and engineers you may never know to get everything right,” he said. “No one wants it to fail, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t take their role seriously in that regard.”

He added that astronomers must rely on their colleagues in rocket and spacecraft engineering to get it right.

Dr. “Anyone who knows how to fly a $10 billion spacecraft in precision orbit won’t be impressed by an astronomer who has never taken an engineering class and is crouched behind his laptop,” said Dr. Lauer. “You admire and empathize with these people and try to act worthy of the incredible gift they have brought into the world.”

And if something goes wrong, some astronomers have said they’ll keep the perspective that it’s just hardware that’s at stake, not humans.

Dr. “If something bad happens, my heart breaks,” Prescod-Weinstein said. “I’m glad that at least human lives are not in danger.”

Working on the telescope’s infrared imaging device, Dr. Rieke said there’s a lot to look forward to if everything will work out as intended.

“We’re going to have another party when the camera pops up,” he said.