by Steve Gorman
December 25 (Reuters) – NASA’s James Webb space telescope, a revolutionary $ 9 billion (€ 7.9 billion) instrument, took off on Saturday from the Kourou space center in French Guiana, on the edge of the rocket European Ariane 5 to reach space and try to observe the first light signals from the Universe.
If all goes as planned, the instrument weighing more than 6 tons will be separated from the fuse after a 26-minute trip into space.
The Webb telescope will then take a month to reach its destination in solar orbit, about a million kilometers from Earth, about four times the distance of our plant from the Moon. (Report Steve Gorman Los Angeles; with Jean-Michel Blot Paris)