Sharlinator t1_je9ldkl wrote on March 30, 2023 at 12:36 PM

Reply to comment by yofomojojo in I remember hearing during the hype leading up to the JWST launch that it would take roughly six months to a year to complete the first pass of an updated CMB map. How are we doing on that? by yofomojojo

JWST is a narrow-field instrument, so it’s ill suited for survey type tasks; it would take an extremely long time to map some appreciable fraction of the sky, and anyway parts of the sky are out of its reach because of the need to remain behind the sunshade. But the NGRST, due to launch in 2026 or 2027, is designed specifically for surveys in visible light/near infrared. Its field of view is approximately the angular size of the full moon, which is an area about 100x larger than that of Hubble or JWST. Mapping the whole sky at that level of detail would still require a couple hundred thousand separate exposures!