Saturday morning, NASA set the stage for the future of astronomy. The James Webb Space Telescope — also referred to as just Webb or JWST — successfully …
Saturday morning, NASA set the stage for the future of astronomy. The James Webb Space Telescope — also referred to as just Webb or JWST — successfully launched from South America, embarking on a decade-long journey to recalibrate how we view the universe. Not only will Webb teach us about hidden regions of space, it has the power to prove whether we’ve correctly documented the events that took place immediately after the Big Bang. Liftoff went « exactly as expected » at 4:20 a.m. PT (or 9:20 a.m. local time in French Guiana), according to ground control. The team continuously highlighted the spacecraft’s « nominal » trajectory and performance, relieving tensions that were spiking for the painstaking minutes before launch. After a seamless deployment of Webb’s solar array about 30 minutes later, the telescope began charging up for the rest of its cosmic expedition. The full sequence was a resounding triumph. Webb is set to travel 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth over the next six months and begin orbiting the sun at the vital-for-the-mission second Lagrange point. Once that happens, Webb will begin sending back images of the universe. But these won’t be mere intergalactic photos. Webb will offer us a new story of the cosmos, completely unfiltered. This will be a giant step forward from the Hubble telescope, which launched along with the Discovery space shuttle in 1990. But before we get into the incredible data that Webb promises to reveal, here is context of what just blasted into outer space after two decades of work and about $10 billion. You can also take a deeper dive into the technical aspects of Webb here.
