Photo: LEGO Ideas/Tonysmyuncle
LEGO is no stranger to replicating real-life spacecraft in tiny plastic brick form. Just a quick search on the Danish toymaker's website will reveal a wealth of space-related vehicles, from the Space Shuttle Discovery to the Perseverance rover and everything in between. But at least one major space instrument was missing from the LEGO inventory at the time of writing: the James Webb Space Telescope.
The most expensive (the thing cost around $10 billion), most advanced, and most complex telescope ever devised left our planet after a very long waiting time (some 30 years in all) in late 2021. It rapidly headed to the place from where it would forever spy on the past and distant Universe, the Lagrange point 2 (L2), located some 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) away from our planet.
A place of nearly perfect gravitational equilibrium between the Earth and the Sun, L2 allowed Webb to simply redefine our view of the surrounding space in the little over two years it has been up there.
Starting from the first true science image it produced, shown by President Joe Biden in July 2022 as a revelation of the deepest view of the distant Universe and ending with the many exciting snapshots of exoplanets it delivered, the JWST is clearly well on track to make human space history.
It would only be natural for the tool, then, to be sung in LEGO form. And that's exactly what the Danes are currently pondering, after a private design of the Webb reached the required 10,000 backers on LEGO Ideas.
We first stumbled upon the LEGO Webb in the summer of 2021, before the actual thing was launched into space. It was proposed by an independent LEGO builder who goes by the name Tonysmyuncle and also happens to be an astronomer. The miniature Webb seems to have everything it takes to become a future hit of the plastic bricks toy world.
Just like the real thing, the LEGO Webb is foldable, to mimic the way it was stowed inside the fairing of the Ariane 5 rocket that carried it into space, and has all of the telescope's major components: science instruments, propulsion, power, and communications systems.
The tool's main instrument, the 21-foot (6.4 meters) gold-coated mirror, is naturally included, only on a much smaller scale and without the gold coating part. The mirror design is however stunning, as it's made of 18 movable hexagonal segments.
We are not given the specifics of the toy, meaning the number of bricks required to put it together or the dimensions of the finished display.
As said, the LEGO James Webb telescope is currently under the review of the company's higher-ups, and even if that doesn't guarantee it will make it into production, it kind of makes us hopeful it will, in a sort of early Christmas for some of us.
After all, what space enthusiast wouldn't want a piece of space exploration history sitting on their desks?
A place of nearly perfect gravitational equilibrium between the Earth and the Sun, L2 allowed Webb to simply redefine our view of the surrounding space in the little over two years it has been up there.
Starting from the first true science image it produced, shown by President Joe Biden in July 2022 as a revelation of the deepest view of the distant Universe and ending with the many exciting snapshots of exoplanets it delivered, the JWST is clearly well on track to make human space history.
It would only be natural for the tool, then, to be sung in LEGO form. And that's exactly what the Danes are currently pondering, after a private design of the Webb reached the required 10,000 backers on LEGO Ideas.
We first stumbled upon the LEGO Webb in the summer of 2021, before the actual thing was launched into space. It was proposed by an independent LEGO builder who goes by the name Tonysmyuncle and also happens to be an astronomer. The miniature Webb seems to have everything it takes to become a future hit of the plastic bricks toy world.
Just like the real thing, the LEGO Webb is foldable, to mimic the way it was stowed inside the fairing of the Ariane 5 rocket that carried it into space, and has all of the telescope's major components: science instruments, propulsion, power, and communications systems.
The tool's main instrument, the 21-foot (6.4 meters) gold-coated mirror, is naturally included, only on a much smaller scale and without the gold coating part. The mirror design is however stunning, as it's made of 18 movable hexagonal segments.
We are not given the specifics of the toy, meaning the number of bricks required to put it together or the dimensions of the finished display.
As said, the LEGO James Webb telescope is currently under the review of the company's higher-ups, and even if that doesn't guarantee it will make it into production, it kind of makes us hopeful it will, in a sort of early Christmas for some of us.
After all, what space enthusiast wouldn't want a piece of space exploration history sitting on their desks?
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