![]() ![]() ![]() These included five layers of a thin foil-like plastic that were stretched taut to the size of a tennis court to shield Webb’s instruments from the sun’s heat. The telescope, tightly bundled up to fit inside a European Ariane rocket, unfurled dozens of mechanical limbs and instruments. Webb’s launch on Christmas morning capped a risky 25-year development timeline dotted with engineering challenges, mistakes and cost overruns that made its voyage to space all the more nerve-racking for astronomers and space agency administrators. A follow-up to Hubble, the Webb is designed to see further into the past than its celebrated predecessor in order to study the first stars and galaxies that twinkled alive in the dawn of time, 13.7 billion years ago. The James Webb Space Telescope, named after a former NASA administrator who oversaw the formative years of the Apollo program, is seven times more sensitive than the nearly 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope and three times its size. From this outpost, called the second Lagrange Point or L2, the Webb telescope will be dragged around the sun alongside Earth for years to keep a steady eye on outer space without spending much fuel to maintain its position. The telescope arrived at a location beyond the moon after a final, roughly five-minute firing of the spacecraft’s main thruster, sweeping itself into a small pocket of stability where the gravitational forces of the sun and Earth commingle. Eastern time, engineers confirmed that the James Webb Space Telescope successfully reached its final destination. Earlier this month, astronomers resumed breathing when the observatory unfurled its heat shield and deployed its mirrors and other instruments with few surprises - a remarkable feat given the telescope’s novel design and engineering complexity.Īnd on Monday around 2:05 p.m. But the $10 billion telescope still needed to power through the first leg of its setup phase. 25, with astronomers all over the world holding their breaths. The spacecraft’s arrival checks off another tricky step as scientists on Earth prepare to spend at least a decade using the observatory to study distant light from the beginning of time. Īfter traveling nearly one million miles, the James Webb Space Telescope arrived at its new home on Monday. Follow our live coverage of NASA’s new James Webb Telescope images here. ![]()
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