Things that impress me

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Rikkitic

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#298799 17-Jul-2022 12:33

I saw the BBC Horizon programme on the James Webb telescope last night. The complexity of the engineering that went into that, and the blind faith that everything would simply work as required, was astounding. It was a huge, huge risk. I am amazed that the visionary heroes behind this fantastic marvel of engineering excellence were ever able to get approval to risk 10 billion dollars on it. What a magnificent achievement!

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SJB

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#2943144 17-Jul-2022 12:44

I doubt it was blind faith, more like 100's of man years making sure everything would work as designed with fallback after fallback in case it didn't.

For blind faith you should consider the Apollo astronauts who went to the moon with computers that had about as much processing power as your heat pump remote.

I actually think the ISS is a bigger achievement than the JWT.

FineWine

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#2943150 17-Jul-2022 13:40

Remember the Hubble Space Telescope, launched 1990, had a manufacturers aberration one-50th the thickness of a human hair, in the grinding of the mirror causing images to have a slight fogginess to them (oops). They fixed this in 1993, by getting the astronauts, now optometrists, to fit corrective lenses about the size of a telephone booth, whilst ground staff wrote some nifty computer software. The combined new hardware and software mitigated the effects of the flawed mirror. Expensive oops 🤓!

Whilst the difficult we can do immediately, the impossible takes a bit longer. However, miracles you will have to wait for.