It’s the best Christmas present NASA may have requested.
Agency of James Webb . Space Telescope, the world’s largest and most powerful telescope built to date, successfully blasted into orbit on Saturday. This launch marks the long-awaited start of the Webb telescope’s mission, after over 30 years of development and countless delays.
The $10 billion observatory, billed as the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, was designed to study the early days of the universe, some 100 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars to shine in the universe.
The tennis court-sized observatory launched to the top of the Ariane 5 rocket at 7:20 a.m. ET from a European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The observatory’s takeoff was delayed several times, even earlier this month to investigate a faulty data cable and recent bad weather at the South American launch pad.
Now that the telescope has reached space, it begins an arduous, months-long journey to its designated orbit around the sun, more than a million miles from Earth.
As Webb moves to its final destination, important parts of the observatory have been folded to fit the rocket that will need to operate in space. Some of the most terrifying stunts will happen about five days after launch, when the telescope’s massive laminated sunshade is stretched and its giant golden government mirror unfolds.
The risky, carefully choreographed maneuvers are so complex and so precise that NASA nicknamed the sequence “29 days on the brink”.
“We had about 50 deployments in the first month after launch,” Greg Robinson, program director for the Webb telescope at NASA, told NBC News. “That first two or three weeks will be what some call good anxiety.”
The Webb telescope’s main mirror is more than 21 feet wide, making it the largest mirror to fly in space. The size of the mirror, smaller than that of Hubble and other existing space telescopes, gives Webb the sensitivity to see objects that were previously undetectable.
“The further away something is, the dimmer it looks,” said Marcia Rieke, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and principal investigator of one of Webb’s four main instruments. , you can see as much detail as possible.”
Essentially, the telescope acts like a time machine because it takes time for light to travel through space. This means that when Webb studies light from the most distant galaxies in the universe, the telescope is actually observing what the universe was like billions of years ago.
The Webb telescope is designed to “see” beyond the range of the human eye and other telescopes that observe mainly visible light. Webb’s infrared vision can penetrate thick curtains of cosmic gas and dust, allowing it to see objects that would normally be invisible to other observatories.
Webb’s instruments are also sensitive enough to sniff out the atmospheres of alien planets, to check their chemical composition and assess whether they could support alien life.
“It’s conceivable that we could find an exoplanet whose atmosphere composition – the collection of molecules – is very similar to Earth’s atmosphere,” says Rieke. “It would be amazing if we could do that.”
But before Webb begins to gather any science or take any pictures of the universe, the telescope will go through a rigorous six-month commissioning period to calibrate the instruments and evaluate them. Condition of different parts.
If all is checked, those in control of the mission will finally breathe a sigh of relief.
“Our blood pressure will be high and our heart will beat faster until it’s put into operation,” said Daniel Neuenschwander, director of space transport at the European Space Agency, one of NASA’s international partners. operate completely.
Then it’s up to everyone to guess what Webb might discover, says Robinson.
“I’m curious about what’s out there,” he said. “Where do we come from? What is our place in the universe? Those are the things I look forward to learning.”
