After multiple delays due to technical issues, the world's most powerful space telescope launched into orbit on Saturday, bound for an outpost 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) beyond Earth.
The James Webb Space Telescope, which took three decades and billions of dollars to build, launched from French Guiana's Kourou Space Centre atop an Ariane 5 rocket.
According to Space.com, the telescope is on its way to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2), a gravitationally stable location 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth in the direction of Mars. Webb will arrive in 29 days. There will be plenty of nail-biting activity for the telescope along the journey.
"The Webb observatory has 50 major deployments ... and 178 release mechanisms to deploy those 50 parts," Webb Mission Systems Engineer Mike Menzel, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a deployment-explaining video called "29 Days on the Edge" that the agency posted in October.
Webb began sending back telemetry data five minutes after launch. Still, it wasn't until 27 minutes into the mission that it detached from the Ariane 5. Here's how that dramatic scene played out:
Here it is: humanity’s final look at @NASAWebb as it heads into deep space to answer our biggest questions. Alone in the vastness of space, Webb will soon begin an approximately two-week process to deploy its antennas, mirrors, and sunshield. #UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/DErMXJhNQd
— NASA (@NASA) December 25, 2021
Webb was 75 miles/120 kilometers above the Earth at the time, and it nearly instantly unfolded its solar array to provide electricity. The quest has begun! NASA has provided a tracker to know where this is right now.
NASA James Webb Space Telescope to Join Hubble After Successful Christmas Launch
The ten-billion-dollar investment The Webb Space Telescope is the most complex and expensive space observatory ever built, Nature said. This new observatory will join NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which has been studying the Universe since 1990. Following its launch, Webb will begin the most dangerous aspect of its mission: installing all of the components needed for its massive mirror to stare far into the cosmos, back to the beginning of time.
The collaborative endeavor between the US, Canadian, and European space agencies will accomplish things that its illustrious companion, the Hubble Space Telescope, could not. Hubble was deployed into low-Earth orbit in 1990 and provided breathtaking photographs of stars and galaxies for the past three decades. The telescope's "spectacular images have captured the imagination for decades, and will continue to inspire humanity for years to come," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., in a statement.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, James Webb Telescope features a collecting mirror that is nearly six times the size of Hubble's and is 100 times more sensitive. The telescope was created to see infrared light, and it can peer deeper into space, and hence further back in time, than any other telescope ever built. Webb may view beyond 100 billion years after the Big Bang, whereas Hubble can see back 400 billion years.
"Some of the deep field work that Hubble has done, they would look in a particular field for a couple of weeks," Randy Kimble, a project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, told Space.com. "Webb can reach that kind of sensitivity limit in seven or eight hours."
If all goes well, Webb will shift its small secondary mirror to face its huge primary mirror, which will still be folded up, ten days after launch. The major mirror will start swinging two hinged parts into position two days later, completing the 6.5-meter-wide mirror. The mirror's 18 hexagonal pieces, composed of beryllium and coated with gold, would resemble a massive gleaming honeycomb at that time, Hammel adds, and Webb will become a genuine telescope, capturing light.
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