The successor of the much-loved Hubble Telescope will be launching in 2018, and it'll use mind-blowing technology to help us see the birth of the Universe.
Image: NASA
You probably don't need to be convinced that Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be awesome. But in case you did, Peter Cullen, the voice of Transformers' Optimus Prime, has helped explain why it'll be so groundbreaking in this awesome videointroducing what will be one of humanity's greatest tools for understanding the Universe.
As Michael Shara, from the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Astrophysics,told io9, the James Webb Space Telescope will have 100 times the capabilities that Hubble does.
It's also much larger - the observatory will be launched to an orbit 1.6 million kilometres from Earth and will fold out a tennis court-sized sun shield and 6.4-metre-wide wide primary mirror. This beryllium mirror system is the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope, and is made up of 18 giant mirror segments.
The telescope also uses microshutters - new technology that will allow it to record the spectra of light from distant objects and simultaneously observe up to 100 objects in any field in the sky.
Basically all of this means that it's so powerful that it will actually be able to see the first stars forming and the beginning of galaxies after the Big Bang. Yep, that's right, this telescope will let us see the BIRTH of the Universe.
Astrophysicists also think that they'll be able to directly image planets orbiting other stars. But perhaps what is most exciting is that they really don't yet know the limits of the telescope or what its biggest discoveries will be.
Before Hubble, for example, we had no idea that Dark Energy existed - now as far as we're aware it makes up 70% of the Universe. The James Webb Space Telescope will likely make similar unexpected breakthroughs.
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