NASA’s long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope, a USD 10 billion engineering marvel, launched into deep space from French Guiana on Christmas morning.
The telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and Canada’s space agency, and is said to be the most powerful observatory ever sent into space.
✅ Milestone achieved. @NASAWebb is safely in space, powered on, and communicating with ground controllers.
The space telescope is now on its way to #UnfoldTheUniverse at its final destination one million miles (1.5 million km) away from Earth. pic.twitter.com/gqICd0Xojz
— NASA (@NASA) December 25, 2021
Astronomers waited for decades as budgetary and technical delays have stalled Webb’s completion and launch. But on Christmas morning, humanity went a step closer to witnessing the spacecraft begin its scientific mission. The Webb telescope was designed to probe a crucial stretch of early cosmic history known to astronomers as the dark ages.
Cosmologists surmise that the first stars appeared when the universe was only about 100 million years old. (Today it is 13.8 billion years old.) The farthest and earliest galaxy seen by astronomers, using the Hubble Space Telescope, dates to when the universe was older, 400 million years after the Big Bang. What happened during those intervening 300 million years when the universe took luminous flight, how the Big Bang turned into a sky full of constellations and life, is a mystery.
The Webb telescope, successor of the Hubble telescope, will also help astronomers better study supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, and planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy. NASA signed an agreement with ESA to launch Webb on an Ariane 5 rocket from Arianespace, a French rocket maker, in 2003.
To achieve these scientific observations, the Webb telescope relies on a primary mirror 6.5 meters in diameter, compared with the mirror on the Hubble, which is 2.4 meters. That gives it about seven times as much light gathering capability and thus the ability to see further into the past.
Another crucial difference is that it is equipped with cameras and other instruments sensitive to infrared, or “heat,” radiation. Engineers had to invent 10 new technologies along the way to make the telescope more sensitive than the Hubble.
