![]() ![]() Hubble, launched in 1990, has offered unprecedented insight into the cosmos during its decades of service. The James Webb Space Telescope launches to space Christmas Day, the culmination of two decades of work: ‘It feels like we sprinted a marathon.’ It was a tantalizing peek at the telescope’s capabilities.īusiness Meet the people bringing us answers on the big bang, and their 13,000-pound helper The test image, released to the public in March, showed a brilliant star that appeared to radiate light from six points, a feature of the telescope’s hexagonal mirrors.īut the background caught scientists’ attention: Behind the star were countless orange dots, each representing a galaxy billions of years old. The mirrors were carefully aligned by focusing on a star with the unwieldy name 2MASS J17554042+6551277. The process wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an episode of “Transformers.” (Indeed, NASA released a short video about Webb featuring Peter Cullen, the actor who voiced Optimus Prime in the original 1980s cartoon.)Įach mirror is coated in 100 nanometers of gold to enhance its ability to reflect infrared light. Once that was deployed, the telescope’s 18 hexagonal mirrors swung into place, creating a honeycomb-like structure 21 feet across. Then it slowly and deliberately unfolded itself over the course of two weeks.Īn intricate system of latches, cables and pins released a five-layer sunshield about the size of a tennis court. It took nearly a month for the telescope to get there. It’s one of five places where the gravitational forces of the sun and the Earth are in balance, allowing Webb to remain a fixed distance from our planet. Its destination was L2, scientific shorthand for the second Lagrange point roughly 930,000 miles from Earth. It intercepts light in the infrared part of the spectrum, whose wavelengths are too long to be visible to the human eye.īuilt at Northrop Grumman’s Space Park in Redondo Beach, Webb launched on Christmas Day. Webb can, quite literally, see galaxies far, far away as they were long, long ago - just a few hundred million years after the big bang. ![]()
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