@Chronos. Huh. I thought the implication was that, since there were only that many numbers, that the world was going to end before we made it to Christmas (likely due to a meteor or something). I’m glad it’s less dark than that.
Ah, and one more detail: Looking it up, it’s launching on the 22nd. So that’s when Christmas falls this year for astronomers. Assuming it doesn’t blow up.
That’d be why the numbers start at 5, instead of 1, so they could get to 22.
Nope. There are only 18 segments, so that numbering scheme does not work. It’s all in the date.
However, a successful launch is not going to be a signal for astronomers to relax. True, it’s a very critical part of the project, but there are others just as critical. It’s not going to stay in Earth orbit, but will move out to the Sun-Earth L2 position and orbit around that. And while it’s doing so, it’s going to be unfolding the heat shield and moving those 18 segments into place. The thing is like ten Rube Goldberg devices rolled into one. There’s all kinds of single step failures that could ruin it.
The difference between the 5th and 22nd of December (inclusive) is 18, which is the number of mirror segments in the James Webb Space Telescope main mirror.
He’s got his work cut out to top “I Just Don’t Trust Them”.
Should never have appointed someone named Ebenezer Grinch as RSO…
Real-life example of this: At one time, there was a planned space mission called LISA, that would have been a space-based gravitational wave detector. One of the difficulties with it was that it would have heard every gravitational wave source in the appropriate frequency, including things like white dwarf binaries, of which we expect there to be hundreds in our Galaxy. So the data analysis had to be able to pick out all of these large numbers of sources. Scientists would generate mock data sets of many plausible and not-so-plausible sources, and send them to each other, to see if they could unravel them.
The team at my school started off by trying to fit all the signal they could with white dwarf binaries, because we expect there to be a lot of those, and then see what’s left. They were embarrassed to discover that any signal could be entirely fitted by the appropriate set of white dwarf binaries, so if you ever wanted any chance of finding anything else at all, you needed a different strategy.
Sounds like you accidentally reinvented Fourier analysis 
Not me; my friends. And it’s not quite Fourier analysis, but it’s very similar: They referred to it as “the white dwarf transform”.
Sorry about misattributing the issue to you. “White dwarf transform” is a great term.
Transform, that was White Dwarf’s big hit on their second album, right?