![]() “Hubble was worth it, and Hubble was late. But as many astronomers point out, even the beloved Hubble Space Telescope faced similar woes. The telescope is massively over budget and is launching more than a decade late-partly a consequence of unrealistic early plans. Like many of humankind’s most ambitious projects, JWST has hit multiple snags on its path to space. Right: The fairing (nose cone), 18 feet wide and 56 feet tall, is lowered over the James Webb Space Telescope atop the Ariane 5 rocket. NASA is responsible for the bulk of the mission’s $10 billion bill, but ESA, one of several partners, provided the Ariane 5 rocket needed to ferry the telescope into space from the leafy tropical outpost. ![]() The telescope’s final stop on Earth was the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana-an expansive launch complex that’s bordered on one side by the tangled Amazonian jungle and on the other by the Atlantic Ocean. We’re looking back through the universe, close to the edge of the big bang 13.8 billion years ago.” “It’s doing time travel at the same time it’s examining space. “Don’t think about JWST as a space telescope-it is a space-time telescope,” says Mark McCaughrean, senior science advisor at the European Space Agency (ESA). With an eye that’s sensitive enough to see a bumblebee in lunar orbit, the telescope will peer into the primordial murk from which stars, galaxies, and planets emerged, piercing the darkness that has occluded the gaze of other great observatories. The telescope's mission is to tell the story of the universe, from a few beats after its radiant, percussive birth through the sweep of cosmic ages until now-when humans craft machines that are powerful enough to look back to the beginnings of space and time. When JWST opens its golden, 21-foot-wide eye, it will transform our view of the cosmos and of ourselves. “There are a lot of hard, long weeks ahead, where the telescope has to deploy perfectly.”īut the risk is worth the reward. ![]() “This is a high-risk and a very high-payoff program,” NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy said during a call with reporters on December 21. And the telescope must perform its devilishly difficult dance far beyond the reach of human hands, hurtling toward a point in space a million miles away. Even a single misstep could compromise the entire mission. For JWST’s mission to succeed, the telescope must execute an intricate series of carefully choreographed maneuvers during its first month in space. Whether that flaming rocket ride represents a year-end gift to science or a catastrophic conclusion to 2021 depends on the weeks ahead. ![]() For the world’s most advanced space telescope, and the thousands of people who’ve worked on it over the decades, the starting gun has fired.Īfter more than a quarter-century of planning, designing, building, waiting-and of obsessively testing the most complex space observatory ever assembled-the mammoth James Webb Space Telescope finally launched at 7:20 a.m. ![]()
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