CNET by Monisha Ravisetti 7/20/2022
Commentary: The JWST's story began with a bang, but we ought not to let Hubble's end with a whimper.
The Hubble Space Telescope had begun to reveal the deep universe. And it was exhilarating.
"You'd see these weird things," said Meyer, a Northwestern University professor focused on Hubble discoveries. Among galaxies that were carbon-copies of what you might find in an astronomer's imagination, there were many that didn't look like wispy spirals or ellipticals characteristic of realms closer to ours. That's when Meyer realized what he was looking at.
This was visual proof of our universe's evolution, courtesy of a telescope we'd just flung into space. "That really blew me away," he said. At the time, it was as if humanity had seen as far as it could see.
But soon after, in 1995, Hubble broke its own record when NASA publicly released its first deep field. A seemingly blank section of the sky had shockingly turned out to hold a menagerie of galaxies far, far away. "That very first Hubble deep field image was revolutionary," said Morgan Van Arsdall, systems and deputy program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope at Lockheed Martin. "To look at a 'dark' sliver of the sky and see so many stars and galaxies really drives home how much we still have to learn about the universe."
And for the next 27 years, as we indeed learned more, "Hubble" would be the name attached to almost every stunning piece of the remote cosmos brought to our eyes.
Then came July 11, 2022 -- the day we managed to travel even further, and see even deeper. Without Hubble.
Welcome, James Webb Space Telescope
Just last week, NASA dominated the headlines of possibly every news publication. That's because US President Joe Biden had awkwardly pointed at a magnificent, modern rendition of Hubble's decades-old deep field, elevated by the lens of the agency's brilliant James Webb Space Telescope.
But amid our celebrations, we might want to consider what we did to Hubble over the past several days.
We've openly cast our once trailblazing, beloved telescope as a gaunt "before" model to underscore JWST's beautiful "after" transformation. I'm guilty of it too. Hundreds of articles, Reddit threads and Twitter posts are dedicated to this very concept, and though this isn't without reason, it seems to have created a false narrative. It feels like we're implying Hubble is dead.
Which is why, as we prepare for an inevitable influx of JWST masterpieces, it bears reflecting that without Hubble, we wouldn't have accessed NASA's "after" images at all. "The entire landscape of research is defined by what Hubble saw, and left us speculating about what we might learn if we could see just a little more," Caplan said.
And even though it might feel like it, Hubble certainly isn't dead.
"We will absolutely still need Hubble," said Cornell University astronomer Nikole Lewis. "In fact, I'm in the process of trying to put together a budget for a large treasury program on Hubble." Lewis is after something Hubble has but JWST lacks. She studies exoplanets and intends to use visible and ultraviolet light wavelengths to decode clouds and hazes of foreign worlds -- the type of light JWST isn't sensitive to. "There's a lot of important information at those wavelengths."
More:
https://www.cnet.com/science/space/features/why-nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-is-not-hubbles-replacement/
