After numerous shifts, the James Webb Space Telescope took off into space. On December 25, 2021 at around 1:20 p.m. German time, the superlative space telescope lifted off from the spaceport near Kourou, French Guyana, on board an Ariane 5 rocket. Now it is on its way to its observation post in space around 1.5 million kilometers away to fathom the cosmos. The way to the target orbit should take about four weeks.
“Webb has such transformative abilities that I assume that it will mark a new era – there will be a time before and a time after,” NASA manager Jane Rigby had said before the start. You can find out which technology is on board, when, how and where the telescope is to unfold in space and which goals the mission has in the interactive multimedia story from »Spektrum.de«.
The JWST is supposed to provide new images from the early universe with the help of a 25 square meter mirror. Astrophysicists also want to observe the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. The roughly ten billion dollar cooperation between the space agencies in the USA, Canada and Europe is being traded as the successor to the “Hubble” telescope, which has been in use for more than 30 years and has given astronomers numerous insights into the cosmos.
The idea of such a telescope first emerged at the end of the 1980s, and teams from NASA, ESA and CSA had planned and built since then. The NASA photographer Chris Gunn has documented the progress, a selection of his pictures shows »Spektrum.de« in a special presentation. But with all the successes, things always went wrong, planning was delayed, the costs originally estimated at around 500 million dollars could not be kept and the entire project was in the meantime repeatedly in question. The JWST was originally supposed to start in 2007. 14 years later it worked.