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You're absolutely right, my comment should have targeted the live launch, sorry.
Still, that covers about 20 (shaky cam) seconds of the launch before they switch to an animation (!) of the launch.
Which brings me back to my original gripe: The Ariane 5 is an old vehicle which doesn't have onboard cameras. Private rocket launch companies have eclipsed it. And I think The European Space Agency is not keeping up.
As to cameras on the JWST itself, it looks like they didn't attach any for a reason: https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-no-cameras-reason
Didn't know that...

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Your video, How The James Webb Space Telescope Works, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Imagine sitting in that room with the "highest powered" people in the space telescope industry

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It might help to start with what the Backplane Pathfinder actually is - it's a non-flight replica of the Webb telescope’s center backplane (that link has more info and pictures).

Chamber A allows simulating the cold environment the real telescope will face in space, and is the same vacuum chamber where Apollo spacecraft were tested.

Now, to answer your question: They are testing the test procedures for the real telescope! (source: NASA). I realise that doesn't exactly answer your question, but I haven't found details of the actual tests they plan to run... so as a distraction, here are some more images - http://jwst.nasa.gov/images_backplane.html

Not according to David Thompson, a NASA astrophysicist and deputy project director on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope who compares the risk to Earth from a future gamma-ray burst to "the danger I might face if I found a polar bear in my closet in Bowie, Maryland. It could happen, but it is so unlikely that it is not worth worrying about."

Fact 1: An estimated (the number may be higher) 1.6 planets per star in our galaxy
http://www.space.com/14200-160-billion-alien-planets-milky-galaxy.html

Fact 2: 100 billion galaxies:
We know there are that many, because we've seen them. The hubble space telescope was pointed at a tiny , random black spot in the sky (where no stars from our own galaxy was blocking the field of view) and found 10000 galaxies in that tiny spot about 1/12millionth of the sky. Extrapolating that out, we get that there are atleast 100 billion galaxies, and each of them contains hundreds of millions of stars.

Fact 3:The moon has its own gravity.
Well duh...

Fact 4: 8 Planets in our solar system.
This is of course very well documented. You can see several of them on any given night. One of them , Venus will infact pass directly in front of the sun in a few days, on the 6th of June! That also happened in 2004, but the next one wont be for another 105 years! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus

Fact 5: There were galaxies in the early universe. These have been seen by the Hubble telescope and other observatories:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_formation_and_evolution

Fact 6:The earths tilted axis causes seasons: http://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/v/how-earth-s-tilt-causes-seasons

More later..

I picked up on that also, thought it was just me. The accent sounds different every few words.

>> ^Crosswords:

Is it just the lady's accent or did they have to do some serious editing? It just seems like she gets cut off mid sentence and has the end of another sentence pasted on.
Also "...please don't judge by the size here." Hah!

that's 7 years away though, and works almost exclusively in infrared. In fact the shortest wavelength it can detect is red, and that's the color with the longest wavelength, so from what I can tell it wont take very good natural color images of pretty galaxies. I imagine the scientists will be able to create spectacular virtual images from the data though.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

Eh... it's no James Webb...

>> ^eric3579:

The very high angular resolving power will be achieved when used in conjunction with a ground-based system of radio-telescopes and interferometrical methods, operating at wavelengths of 1.35–6.0, 18.0 and 92.0 cm. With its Earth-based companions, it will form a network able to provide detailed images of the universe at 1,000 times the resolution attainable using the Hubble Space Telescope. -wiki
>> ^rychan:
>> ^rich_magnet:
The title is quite misleading. Hubble is a visible/UV telescope, where this one is a radio telescope. They image completely different parts of the spectrum. Think of the comparison of the ground-based VLA and VLT telescopes: quite different instruments.

Yeah, how can any radio telescope be remotely as sharp as a visible light telescope? At that frequency it's hard to get high angular resolution from a single dish.



Ok, that's believable. But the title and summary clearly imply that this single instrument will be 1,000 times sharper than the HST.

The very high angular resolving power will be achieved when used in conjunction with a ground-based system of radio-telescopes and interferometrical methods, operating at wavelengths of 1.35–6.0, 18.0 and 92.0 cm. With its Earth-based companions, it will form a network able to provide detailed images of the universe at 1,000 times the resolution attainable using the Hubble Space Telescope. -wiki

>> ^rychan:

>> ^rich_magnet:
The title is quite misleading. Hubble is a visible/UV telescope, where this one is a radio telescope. They image completely different parts of the spectrum. Think of the comparison of the ground-based VLA and VLT telescopes: quite different instruments.

Yeah, how can any radio telescope be remotely as sharp as a visible light telescope? At that frequency it's hard to get high angular resolution from a single dish.

>> ^rich_magnet:

The title is quite misleading. Hubble is a visible/UV telescope, where this one is a radio telescope. They image completely different parts of the spectrum. Think of the comparison of the ground-based VLA and VLT telescopes: quite different instruments.


Yeah, how can any radio telescope be remotely as sharp as a visible light telescope? At that frequency it's hard to get high angular resolution from a single dish.

>> ^bovan:

it's RadioAstron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioAstron


fixed it :-)