Apparently, once it gets to L2, it will take a couple of months to cool down to its operating temperature, so I would expect the final focusing adjustments of the mirror sections to wait until after that has occurred.
It is now almost 65 years since Sputnik 1 was launched and intiated the space race. In contrast to Webb it measured 23 inches across and its active "instrumentation" was simply a radio transmitter.
Yes, Webb could potentially be as amazing as Hubble (which famously looked in one of the most empty and dark bits of sky for a very lengthy exposure and found the Hubble Deep Field -- galaxies strew like tiny debris everywhere, more of them than expected).
) about (on the order) of 100 billion.
True, but to clarify, I very much hope and fully expect that several of the probes will not be in orbit. By 2087 micro-probes should be well en route to Alpha Centauri, or other close neighbour. And others will be motoring around in the oceans of Enceladus and Europa. Etc.
The latter a lot sooner. Isn't NASA already considering sending proves to explore under the ice of one or more of the ocean moons? I bet that will happen during our lifetimes.
Considering, yes. But explore remotely by radar (?), seismic (?), possibly a 'drilled' hole. (A nuclear probe, with instrumentation could melt its way down.)
That reminds me of that persistent sci-fi movie trope - where the spaceship has to navigate through or hide in an asteroid belt or cloud and they're dodging between the boulders like a video game - when, in practice, the asteroids would probably be too far apart to even see more than an occasional speck in the distance...
Indeed. By a crude calculation, they are 8 times further apart than we are from the moon: What is the average distance between objects in our asteroid belt?
