(Updates with separation)
by Steve Gorman
December 25 (Reuters) – NASA’s James Webb space telescope, a revolutionary $ 9 billion (€ 7.9 billion) instrument, took off on Saturday 12:20 GMT (1:30 p.m. Paris time) from the Kourou Space Center, in French Guiana, on board the European fuse Ariane 5 to reach space and try to observe the first light signals from the Universe.
As expected, the instrument weighing more than 6 tons separated from the rocket after a 27-minute trip into space.
The Webb telescope will then take 29 days to reach its final destination in solar orbit (point “Lagrange 2”), about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, or about four times the distance of our plant from the Moon.
Unlike its predecessor – the 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope – which circles the earth, Web will be placed in the same orbit as the earth around the sun.
This telescope, named after a former NASA administrator, is 100 times more powerful than Hubble. It is expected to revolutionize astronomers’ understanding of the universe by observing parts of the cosmos dating back a million years after the “Big Bang”.
Webb will primarily observe the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing him to scan the clouds of gas and dust in which the webs are born, while Hubble primarily operated in the optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The main mirror of the new telescope is made up of 18 hexagonal segments in gold-coated bryllium metal, which gives it a large surface area allowing it to collect more light and observe objects farther away, therefore older than Hubble. or any other telescope.
LEON OF COSMOLOGICAL HISTORY
According to astronomers, it will provide access to information about the cosmos hitherto impossible to obtain, dating barely 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical explosion that triggered the expansion of the observable universe there. about 13.8 billion years ago.
Hubble’s observations dated back about 400 million years after the Big Bang, revealing objects that Webb will be able to scrutinize with greater precision.
Apart from the formation of the first stars of the universe, it will also make it possible to study the super-massive black holes which would occupy the center of distant galaxies.
Webb’s instruments also make it possible to search for evidence of potentially life-sustaining atmospheres around dozens of recently documented exoplants – heavenly bodies orbiting distant stars – and to observe worlds much closer to us, such as Mars and Titan, Saturn’s ice moon.
This telescope is the result of an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp is the prime contractor. The launch of the telescope by Arianespace is part of the European contribution.
Astronomical operation of the telescope, which will be managed from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, is expected to begin in summer 2022, after about six months of alignment and calibration of Webb’s mirrors and instruments.
That’s when NASA plans to release the first batch of images captured by Webb, designed to last up to 10 years. (Report Steve Gorman Los Angeles; French version Jean-Michel Blot)