Title:
Is NASA's James Webb Space Telescope a Time Machine?
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
If you could build a time machine, what would it
look like? Maybe, it should look like a telescope.
American scientists are building a space telescope
that they hope will look back over distance and time
to show the universe close to its beginning. But
this distant past will mainly be seen in infrared
light which telescopes and cameras can see, but not
the human eye. The American space agency, NASA, is
now building the largest space telescope ever. The
James Webb Space Telescope is named after NASA's
second director. It will have a mirror seven times
the size of the one on the Hubble Space Telescope.
The mirror is six and a half meters wide, made of
lightweight beryllium and covered in gold. But it
will mainly study the universe in infrared light. We
usually experience infrared light as heat. But, if
you have ever used a TV remote control, you know
there are many uses for it. The James Webb Space
Telescope is a complex engineering project. It will
be huge -- about the size of a passenger jet. And it
will have to be super-cooled. Because the telescope
studies infrared heat, its mirror must be kept very
close to absolute zero. That is minus two hundred
seventy-three degrees Celsius. NASA is building the
Webb telescope at the Goddard Space Center, outside
Washington. The agency hopes to launch it in twenty-fourteen.Jonathan
Gardner is a project scientist for the telescope. We
asked him how the device can look back in time. He
says: "We can see back in time because light takes
time to get from there to here. So, as we look
further and further away, it takes longer and longer
for the light to get from where it's emitted to here
and we can actually see backwards in time." And if
you look far enough, you start to approach the event
that scientists believe gave birth to everything. As
Jonathan Gardner puts it: "We're looking at the
universe when it was much younger and we're looking
back most of the way to the Big Bang."Jonathan
Gardner says: "Any astronomer, at any university, in
any country can write a proposal for what they want
to do with the telescope." The James Webb Space
Telescope should help scientists learn how the first
galaxies formed and what they looked like. It may
even show things scientists never predicted. For VOA
Special English, I'm Carolyn Presutti. You can watch
a video about the James Webb Space Telescope and
download an MP3 of this story at
voaspecialenglish.com.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
