好英语网韦伯太空望远镜升空：史上最大最昂贵，将探索宇宙起源
The dreams and work of a generation of astronomers headed for an orbit around the sun on Saturday in the form of the biggest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built. The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, lifted off from a spaceport near the Equator in Kourou, French Guiana, a teetering pillar of fire and smoke embarking on a million-mile trip to the morning of time.
周六，有史以来最大、最昂贵的太空天文台发射升空，飞向环绕太阳的轨道，一代天文学家的梦想和工作随即启程。詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜是美国宇航局、欧洲航天局和加拿大航天局的合作项目，当天上午它从法属圭亚那库鲁赤道附近的一个太空港升空，在摇曳的火柱和烟雾中开启了上百万英里的旅程。
“The world gave us this telescope and we’re handing it back to the world today,” said Gregory Robinson, the Webb telescope’s program director, during a post-launch news conference in French Guiana.
在法属圭亚那，韦伯望远镜项目主管格雷戈里·罗宾逊在发射后举行的新闻发布会上说：“世界给了我们这台望远镜，我们今天将它交回世界手中。”
在圣诞节的早晨，詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜从法属圭亚那的圭亚那航天中心搭载阿丽亚娜5号火箭发射升空。
The telescope, named for the NASA administrator who led the space agency through the early years of the Apollo program, is designed to see farther in space and further back in time than the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope. Its primary light gathering mirror is 21 feet across, about three times bigger than Hubble, and seven times more sensitive.
该望远镜以阿波罗计划早期美国宇航局局长的名字命名。与人们曾经引以为豪的哈勃空间望远镜相比，它能看到更远的太空和更早的时间。它的主聚光镜约6.4米宽，大约是哈勃望远镜的三倍，灵敏度是它的七倍。
The Webb’s mission is to seek out the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies, which appeared 13.7 billion years ago, burning their way out of a fog leftover from the Big Bang (which occurred 13.8 billion years ago).
韦伯的任务是寻找最早、最遥远的恒星和星系，这些恒星和星系出现在137亿年前，从宇宙大爆炸（发生在138亿年前）后的尘雾中诞生。
Astronomers watching the launch remotely from all over the world, many Zooming together in their pajamas, were jubilant.
世界各地的天文学家远程观看发射，许多人穿着睡衣，兴高采烈地聚在Zoom上。
“What an incredible Christmas present,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“多么神奇的圣诞礼物，”加州大学圣克鲁兹分校的加思·伊林沃思说。
Tod Lauer of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, in an email exchange with other astronomers reported his feeling about the launch: “Just enjoying the most sacred of all space words, “Nominal!” he said, referring to the lingo used by launch teams to describe rockets operating as expected.
托德·劳尔来自美国国家科学基金会国家光学—红外天文研究实验室，他在与其他天文学家的电子邮件交流中写下了自己对这次发射的感受。他说：“正沉浸在所有太空词汇中最神圣的一个，‘一切正常！’”他指的是发射团队用来描述火箭按预期运行的术语。
To which Alan Dressler, a Carnegie Observatory astronomer and one of the founders of the Webb telescope project, replied, “Hallelujah! — another sacred word for the moment, Tod.”
卡内基天文台的天文学家、韦伯望远镜项目的创始人之一艾伦·德雷斯勒回复说：“托德，这一时刻的另一个神圣词——哈利路亚！”
Priyamvada Natarajan, a cosmologist at Yale, emailed from India to describe herself as “Just utterly utterly elated! — wow! wow!”
耶鲁大学的宇宙学家普里娅姆瓦达·纳塔拉詹从印度发来电子邮件，称自己“简直是欣喜若狂！——哇！哇！”
In Baltimore at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the headquarters for Webb’s mission operations, a small group of scientists and NASA officials erupted in screams of joy and applauded during the launch.
太空望远镜科学研究所——运行韦伯任务的总部——位于巴尔的摩，一小群科学家和美国宇航局官员在发射过程中爆发出喜悦的尖叫和掌声。
The flight operations team in another part of the institute then watched as Webb deployed its solar array, then its communications antenna minutes later. Roughly 100 mission personnel will command the spacecraft’s deployments, alternating between 12 hour shifts 24 hours a day as it begins its journey to a point beyond the moon.
接着，该研究所另一地点的飞行运作团队注视着韦伯展开太阳能电池板，几分钟后又展开了通信天线。当它开始飞到月球以外时，大约100名任务人员将指挥航天器的调度情况，全天候执行每12小时的轮班。
“They’ve got real work to do,” said Kenneth Sembach, the institute’s director. “Our teams have spent the last two years doing numerous rehearsals.”
“他们有重要的工作要做，”该研究所所长肯尼斯·森巴赫说。“我们的团队在过去两年中进行了多次演练。”
Equipped with detectors sensitive to infrared or “heat radiation,” the telescope will paint the universe in colors no human eye has ever seen. The expansion of the universe shifts the visible light from the earliest, most distant galaxies into the longer infrared wavelengths.
望远镜配备了对红外线或“热辐射”敏感的探测器，将以人眼从未见过的颜色描绘宇宙。最早、最遥远的星系的可见光波长因宇宙的膨胀而被转变为较长的红外波长。
Studying the heat from these infant galaxies, astronomers say, could provide important clues to when and how the supermassive black holes that squat in the centers of galaxies form. Closer to home in the present, the telescope will sniff at the atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby stars, looking for the infrared signatures of elements and molecules associated with life, like oxygen and water.
天文学家说，研究这些新生星系的热量可以为了解位于星系中心的超大质量黑洞何时以及如何形成提供重要线索。在时空距离地球更近的现在，该望远镜将嗅探围绕附近恒星运行的行星的大气层，寻找与生命相关的元素和分子——如氧气和水——的红外特征。
The Webb will examine all of cosmic history, billions of years of it, astronomers say — from the first stars to life in the solar system. This week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson called the telescope a “keyhole into the past.”
天文学家说，韦伯将检验宇宙全部数十亿年的历史——从第一批恒星到太阳系中的生命。本周，美国宇航局局长比尔·纳尔逊称这架望远镜是“通往过去的钥匙孔”。
“It is a shining example of what we can accomplish when we dream big,” he said. After the launch he said, “It’s a great day for planet Earth.”
他说：“这是一个杰出的范例，说明只要心怀远大的梦想，就能实现。”在成功发射后，他说：“这对地球来说是重要的一天。”
The beginning of the telescope’s journey did not go unnoticed by the space agency’s paymasters in Congress, who have stuck with the project for decades now.
美国宇航局在国会的资助者也在密切注视望远镜的启程。他们几十年来一直坚持这个项目。
“Today’s successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope marks a historic milestone in our advancement of astrophysics and space science,” said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas and chairwoman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, in a news release.
得克萨斯州民主党众议员，众议院科学、太空和技术委员会主席埃迪·伯尼斯·约翰逊在新闻发布会上说：“今天詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜的成功发射，标志着我们在天体物理学和太空科学发展中的一个历史性里程碑。”
Saturday’s successful launch caps an expensive effort that stretched over 25 years of uncertainty, mistakes and ingenuity. Webb’s 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors, advanced temperature controllers and ultrasensitive infrared sensors were pieced together in a development timeline filled with cost overruns and technical hurdles. Engineers had to invent 10 new technologies along the way to make the telescope far more sensitive than Hubble.
周六的成功发射为长达25年的耗资巨大的努力画上了句号，其间经历了各种不确定性、错误和独创工作。在充满成本超支和技术障碍的开发周期里，韦伯望远镜的18个镀金六角形镜子，先进的温度控制器和超灵敏的红外传感器组合到了一起。在这个过程中，工程师们发明了10项新技术，使其灵敏度远远超过哈勃。
When NASA picked the Northrop Grumman company to lead Webb’s construction in 2002, mission managers estimated that it would cost $1 billion to $3.5 billion and launch to space in 2010. Over-optimistic schedule projections, occasional development accidents and disorganized cost reporting dragged out the timeline to 2021 and ballooned the overall cost to $10 billion.
2002年，美国宇航局选择诺斯罗普·格鲁曼公司来领导韦伯的建造，项目经理们估计，它将耗资10亿至35亿美元，并于2010年发射升空。过于乐观的进度预测、偶尔发生的研发事故和混乱的成本报告将工期拖到了2021年，总成本飙升至100亿美元。
Even its final lap to the launchpad seemed perilous as a mishap in the Kourou rocket bay, disconnected cables and worrisome weather reports moved the Webb’s departure date deeper into December, until a Christmas morning launch could not be avoided.
就连发射前的最后阶段也显得非常危险，由于库鲁火箭舱发生的事故、断开的电缆和令人担忧的天气报告，韦伯的出发日期推迟到了12月，直到最后在圣诞节上午发射。
“I’m so happy today,” said Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency. But he added, “It’s very nerve racking, I couldn’t do launches every single day, this would not be good for my life expectancy.”
“我今天很高兴，”欧洲航天局总干事约瑟夫·阿施巴赫说。但他还说，“太让人紧张了，我可不能每天都有发射任务，命都要没了。”
For astronomers and engineers, the launch was also a suspenseful sight to take in.
对于天文学家和工程师来说，这次发射也充满悬念。
“It was hard to sleep last night,” said Adam Riess, an astrophysicist and Nobel laureate who will use the Webb telescope to measure the expansion rate of the universe.
“昨晚令人难以入睡，”天体物理学家、诺贝尔奖得主亚当·里斯说。他将使用韦伯望远镜测量宇宙的膨胀率。
“It’s 7 a.m. on Christmas and I’m awake and everyone is excited— is this what having kids is like?” Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, wrote on Twitter. They added, “Terrible, I’m going back to sleep,” which they confirmed in an email they did, but not before the solar array deployed.
“现在是圣诞节的早上7点，我醒着，每个人都很兴奋——这就是生孩子的感觉吗？”芝加哥阿德勒天文馆的天文学家卢西安·沃尔克维茨在Twitter上写道。她还说，“太糟糕了，我要回去睡觉了。”沃尔克维茨在一封电子邮件中证实了推文内容，但那是在太阳能电池板展开之后的事了。
But the launch itself is only the first step in an even more treacherous journey that astronomers and rocket engineers have called “six months of anxiety.”
但发射本身只是一段更加危险的旅程的第一步，天文学家和火箭工程师称这段旅程为“六个月的焦虑”。
The solar panel deployment half an hour into the flight was the first in a monthlong series of maneuvers and deployments with what NASA calls “344 single points of failure.”
飞行半小时后展开太阳能电池板是长达一个月的一系列操作和展开中的第一次，美国宇航局称这个过程存在“344次单点失败”的可能性。
“I could finally start breathing again when the solar arrays came out,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. “We have so many hard days ahead of us, but you can’t even get started on any of that until this part goes perfectly.”
“太阳能电池板出来后，我终于松了一口气，”美国宇航局副局长帕姆·梅尔罗伊说。“我们前面还有很多艰难的日子，但在这部分工作完美进行之前，你根本不能开始任何工作。”
Among the most tense moments, astronomers say, will be the unfolding of a giant sunscreen, the size of a tennis court, designed to keep the telescope in the dark and cold enough so that its own heat doesn’t swamp the heat from distant stars. The screen is made of five layers of a plastic called Kapton, which is similar to mylar, and as flimsy as mylar. It has occasionally ripped during rehearsals of its deployment.
天文学家说，在最紧张的时刻之一，将会展开一个巨大的防晒网，有一个网球场那么大，让望远镜处于足够黑暗和寒冷的环境中，这样望远镜自身的热量就不会盖过来自遥远恒星的热量。屏幕由五层名为Kapton的塑料制成，它类似于特殊拉伸聚酯薄膜，而且同样脆弱。在展开演练期间，偶尔会发生撕裂的情况。
If all goes well, astronomers will start to see the universe in a new light next summer. They are most looking forward to what they didn’t expect. As Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said recently: “Every time we launch a big bold telescope, we get a surprise. This one is the biggest and boldest yet.”
如果一切顺利，明年夏天天文学家将开始以一种全新的视角观察宇宙。他们最期待的是他们没有预料到的事情。正如美国宇航局负责科学事务的副局长托马斯·楚比兴最近所说：“每次发射一个大胆的大型望远镜，我们都会得到一个惊喜。这是迄今为止规模最大、最大胆的一次。”
But if anything goes wrong in the coming weeks and months, the field of astronomy’s view of the origins of existence may be imperiled. When problems snarled the work of the Hubble in the 1990s, NASA sent astronauts in the space shuttles to perform repair work. The Webb telescope is headed to a point beyond the moon where no spacecraft has ever carried humans before (although Ms. Melroy says NASA has contemplated a robotic repair mission if one were needed).
但是，如果未来几周或几个月出现任何问题，可能会危及天文学关于存在起源的观点。1990年代，当哈勃望远镜的工作出现问题时，美国宇航局派出宇航员乘坐航天飞机进行修复工作。韦伯望远镜的目标是月球以外的一个地方，以前从未有航天器搭载人类抵达（不过梅尔罗伊说，如果需要的话， 美国宇航局考虑过机器人修复任务）。
“I tell friends of mine who are not astronomers, after the launch, you mostly want to hear 30 days of nothing,” Dr. Riess said. “And we’ll be really happy if we hear nothing.”
“我告诉我那些不是搞天文的朋友，在发射后，你最希望的是30天里什么消息都没有，”里斯说。“如果没消息，我们会很高兴的。”