Top stories: Caterpillar wrestling, next-generation CRISPR, and the troubled James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope

The scientific capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) fall into four themes. The End of the Dark Ages: First Light and Reionization theme seeks to identify the first luminous sources to form and to determine the ionization history of the universe. The Assembly of Galaxies theme seeks to determine how galaxies and the dark matter, gas, stars, metals, morphological structures, and ...

Solar System Observations with the James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope will enable a wealth of new scientific investigations in the nearand midinfrared, with sensitivity and spatial/spectral resolution greatly surpassing its predecessors. In this paper, we focus upon Solar System science facilitated by JWST, discussing the most current information available concerning JWST instrument properties and observing techniques relevant to pl...

The Scientific Capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope

Studying Resolved Stellar Populations with the James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be an exciting, highly capable tool, able to make important contributions to studies of stellar populations in nearby galaxies, including our own. JWST observations will contribute to: (1) the study of the star formation histories of nearby galaxies, exploiting the large lever arm provided by visibleinfrared colors; (2) the derivation of the properties...

Towards a Heuristic for Scheduling the James Webb Space Telescope

Scheduling the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) requires modeling and minimizing the buildup of angular momentum of the spacecraft. Accounting for momentum management is expected to be a major driver of spacecraft efficiency and lifetime. We develop a heuristic that reduces momentum buildup and show how the heuristic can be used in a simulation of the operations concept for JWST scheduling. Th...