Nasa fights to save the James Webb space telescope from the axe

shocked astronomers by the House of Representatives motion to scrap deep space observatory after the amount of costs of $ 6.5 billion in the U.S.

NASA fights to save its next generation space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope. Politicians want to finish the project - one of the most complex ever devised by engineers of space -. Although billions of dollars have been invested in construction

Scheduled for launch in 2016, James Webb, to replace the veteran Hubble Space Telescope in orbit in deep space, a million miles from Earth, and into the dawn of universe. Their comments have been meeting the most important questions about the structure of the cosmos, astronomers say.

The cost of the observatory has soared from an initial estimate of 1.6 billion (£ 996m) to over $ 6.5 billion (£ 4,000,000,000). As a result, budgets for other research projects in astronomy have been reduced, the leading magazine

Nature

to describe the James Webb as "the telescope that ate astronomy. "

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives appropriations "Committee on Commerce, Justice and Science decided he'd had enough of these rising costs and moved to cancel the project by extraction $ 1.9 billion budget for NASA next year.

• a brief statement issued by the Republican-dominated committee, said the project "has billions of dollars in the budget and plagued by mismanagement." The decision must still be approved by the full Appropriations Committee, House of Representatives and the Senate. But analysts say that the telescope is now facing a struggle for survival.

astronomers Not surprisingly, the movement to have the telescope, which has been under construction since 2004 and is named after a former NASA administrator, shocked. The James Webb was destined to be the centerpiece of astronomical research for the next two decades. Its segmented mirror would be almost three times the diameter of the Hubble Telescope, and because of that orbit outside the Earth's atmosphere would be able to make observations of unprecedented accuracy. This will allow you to capture images from a time when the first stars and galaxies lit up the universe.

Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, said: "[Cancellation] would be an absolute disaster for cosmology After two decades to boost Hubble to its limits, which revolutionized the Astronomy. The next step would be to pack up and leave. Hubble is good enough to see what we lack in the beginning of time. "The James Webb will be able to fill these gaps, he said.

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