The James Webb telescope’s special orbital path keeps it constantly aligned with Earth. (File)
New York:
The James Webb Space Telescope, a NASA instrument designed to give humanity its first glimpse of the baby universe as it existed when the earliest galaxies were believed to have formed, was launched Saturday from the northeast coast of South America.
The revolutionary $9 billion infrared telescope, hailed by NASA as the first space science observatory of the next decade, was bundled into the payload compartment of an Ariane 5 rocket ready to detonate at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT) from the European space Agency (ESA) launch site in French Guiana.
If all goes according to plan, the 14,000-pound instrument, which will unfold to almost the size of a tennis court, will be released from the French-built rocket into space after a 26-minute ride into space.
Over the course of the next month, the Webb telescope will fly to its destination orbiting the sun about 1 million miles from Earth — about four times farther away than the moon. Webb’s special orbital path keeps it constantly aligned with Earth as the planet and telescope orbit the sun together.
By comparison, Webb’s 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits Earth itself at a distance of 340 miles, moving in and out of the planet’s shadow every 90 minutes.
Named after the chief of NASA during most of the early 1960s, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than Hubble and is expected to profoundly change scientists’ understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Webb will view the cosmos primarily in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to peer through clouds of gas and dust where stars are born, while Hubble has mainly worked at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
Cosmological history lesson
The new telescope’s primary mirror — made up of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal — also has a much larger light-gathering area, allowing it to observe objects at greater distances, ie further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
That, astronomers say, will bring into focus a glimpse of the cosmos never seen before — dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that estimated the expansion of the observable universe at 13.8 billion years ago. set in motion.
Hubble’s view stretches back to about 400 million years after the Big Bang, a period just after the very first galaxies are believed to have formed vast clusters and stars, gases and other interstellar matter.
In addition to examining more closely the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies in the Universe, astronomers are keen to study supermassive black holes believed to occupy the centers of distant galaxies.
Webb’s instruments also make it ideal for searching for evidence of potentially life-sustaining atmospheres around dozens of newly documented exoplanets — celestial bodies orbiting distant stars — and for observing worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn’s icy moon Titan.
The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in collaboration with the European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp. was the prime contractor. The launch vehicle Arianespace is part of the European contribution.
Webb is being developed at a cost of $8.8 billion, with operating costs expected to bring the total price tag to about $9.66 billion, much higher than planned when NASA previously aimed for a 2011 launch.
Operated out of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the telescope’s astronomical operation is expected to begin in the summer of 2022, after about six months of alignment and calibration of Webb’s mirrors and instruments. The space observatory is designed to last up to 10 years.
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