After several tense days of unfurling and clicking its various parts into place, the biggest and most sophisticated space telescope ever launched is now complete. JWST
After several tense days of unfurling and clicking its various parts into place, the biggest and most sophisticated space telescope ever launched is now complete.
“I am feeling absolutely elated,” says Antonella Nota, the European Space Agency’s project scientist for Webb. "We are now all part of history as we watch this magnificent machine getting ready to explore the Universe.” Smooth moves Webb, which launched from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, is now more than one million kilometres from Earth. It should reach its final destination, a gravitationally stable point in space known as L2, on 23 January. From there, it will study astronomical phenomena such as the most distant galaxies in the Universe, newborn stars enshrouded in dust and the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.
“I think I was just nervous about deploying something big and floppy,” Hertz says. No other space observatory has had such a shield, so it is “new and unfamiliar”, he adds. Cool it now The last major step came at 10:29 a.m. US Eastern time on 8 January, when the final segment of the primary mirror swung into place. That mirror is so large that, like the sunshield, it had to be folded up for launch to fit atop the Ariane 5 rocket that carried it to space.
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