It is a bonus of sorts, a subject of study those 1980s-era visionaries could have scarcely foreseen: exoplanets.Įvidence for planets orbiting stars other than the sun first emerged in the 1990s (a finding that earned some of its discoverers a share of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics). The other major scientific frontier that JWST will probe is one that has received less attention but might prove to be just as profound in our understanding of the universe. From the inception of JWST, the primary goal has been to glimpse these phenomena-the first luminous objects in the universe. JWST, however, will be able to see as far into the past as 100 million years after the big bang, a period when most matter consisted of only the primordial elements and was just beginning to coalesce into stars and galaxies. At that point in the universe’s history, however, matter had already undergone several generations of evolution-galaxies merging and shredding, supernovae seeding space with additions to (what sentient beings on Earth would one day call) the periodic table of the elements. Much of the attention leading up to today’s launch has focused on the ability of JWST to peer farther into the past than HST, which has observed infant galaxies as far back as approximately 400 million years after the big bang. The Next Generation Space Telescope (as the future JWST was then known) would be looking at the universe in infrared, the regime into which cosmic expansion would have stretched, or redshifted, visible light emitted more than 13 billion years ago. It would therefore be able to see farther across the universe (and, given that the speed of light is finite, farther back in time) than any terrestrial telescope.Įven so, HST would be observing primarily in optical wavelengths-the tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can detect.
James webb telescope launch free#
By orbiting Earth, HST would have a line of sight free of the optical distortions endemic to our planet’s atmosphere. The telescope that would become JWST was already under discussion even before HST launched in April 1990. For the Space Telescope Science Institute, says Massimo Stiavelli, head of the JWST mission office, “the easy part is done, and the hard part starts now.” Then he laughs. “It’s the best Christmas ever.” The moment JWST’s solar panels emerged, control of the mission officially shifted to Baltimore. “Today we said goodbye to the telescope on the ground, and we opened our eyes to the universe.” “When we look farther, delve deeper or measure more precisely, we’re bound to find something wondrous,” says Ken Sembach, the Space Telescope Science Institute’s director. The James Webb Space Telescope is very much a part of that exploration.”Īs JWST separated from its rocket’s upper stage, a video feed showed the now independent spacecraft gleaming in sunlight, capturing one last close-up look at the observatory before its quest to pierce the veil of cosmic darkness took it inaccessibly far from Earth. That’s what this business is all about, and that’s why we dare to explore. “We know that in great reward, there is great risk. going to take us back to the very beginnings of the universe,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson in postlaunch remarks. “This is a great day-not only for America and our European and Canadian partners, but it’s a great day for Planet Earth. As the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), JWST is one of those once-in-a-generation scientific projects that can strain the patience of government benefactors, as well as the responsible agency’s credibility, but also define a field for decades to come-and possibly redefine it forever. Also at risk is the viability of NASA’s vast space-science portfolio, if not the future of astronomy itself. Only after that first deployment proved successful, said a NASA spokesperson in a statement to Scientific American, would “we know we have a mission.”Īstronomers have more riding on the rocket than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Half an hour postlaunch, the telescope still needed to decouple from its host rocket, after which it had to deploy solar panels to partly power its journey.
(ET), the rocket carrying the largest, most ambitious space telescope in history cleared the launchpad in French Guiana, and the members of mission control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore roared their elation. The relief was as deep as the stakes were high.
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