James Webb Space Telescope on tour

The James Webb Space Telescope , a collaborative project between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, isn’t scheduled to be launched until 2013. Curious individuals, however, can get a good understanding of the size and complexity of the planned successor to the Hubble Space Telescope thanks to this full-scale model built by Northrop Grumman Corp, the prime contractor in charge of building the spacecraft. The model has been on display in half a dozen locations over the past two years, most recently at January’s American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Washington. Next month the model will be on display on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

The telescope will feature a 6.5-meter-diameter beryllium primary mirror composed of 18 hexagonal segments whose alignments can be individually tweaked. A five-layer sunshield the size of a tennis court will block solar radiation and keep the mirrors and instruments cold enough to detect faint infrared signals. (Image courtesy of Northrop Grumman.)

To submit candidate images for Back Scatter, visit http://www.physicstoday.org/backscatter.html .