by Steve Gorman
December 25 (Reuters) – NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a groundbreaking $ 9 billion (€ 7.9 billion) instrument, lifted off Saturday from the Kourou Space Center in French Guiana aboard the European Ariane 5 rocket to reach space and attempt 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 rocket after a 26-minute trip into space.
It will then take a month for the Webb telescope to reach its destination in solar orbit, about a million kilometers from Earth, about four times the distance of our planet from the Moon.
(Report Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; with Jean-Michel Bélot in Paris)