The James Webb Space Telescope is a flagship mission for Nasa that aims to observe worlds beyond the solar system and the first stars and galaxies that lit up the universe.
On Christmas Day, the European Space Agency will send the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space with an Ariane 5 rocket.
The project has taken more than 30 years to be conceived, designed and built and has been beset with delays, cost overruns, redesigns, and technical problems that caused the launch to be delayed this week.
The chair of the Space Telescope Institute Council and director of strategic partnerships at Space Park Leicester said he was excited and nervous at the same time. We might get this telescope into space after so long. I am nervous because we all know that even though the rocket is good, there are risks in getting there, and a lot of things have to go perfectly for us to have a working telescope.
The primary mirror at the heart of the telescope will allow it to see the faint glow from some of the oldest, most distant objects in the universe. The glow from the earliest stars is redshifted into the longer wavelength of light because the universe is expanding.
An artist's illustration of a telescope. The picture is from the Nasa/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock
The Hubble space telescope is in the same area as the sun. It is going to be the second lagrange point, or a million miles from Earth. The telescope will be able to observe the heavens in the infrared realm with the Earth and the sun behind it.
During the month-long journey to L2, the primary mirror must be folded up and unfolded. Along the way, the telescope will deploy a sunshade the size of a tennis court to help shield it from the sun's rays.
Barstow said they want it to be cold and space to be warm. There is a lot of heat from the Earth and the sun. It takes a long time to cool everything down.
Beyond observing the first stars and galaxies, he will watch alien worlds cross the faces of their stars and measure how light is absorbed in the planets' atmospheres. This will show us hints about the chemistry of the atmosphere.
The science is going to be transformational. It is the largest, most sensitive telescope ever put in space. It was designed to look back at the very early history of the universe and to understand the formation of the first stars. It is about us. It is about how we came to be and what our place is in the universe.
Mission scientists will spend another five months checking out the telescope's systems and ensuring they are working properly before taking data at the start of the summer.
I just want it to be working. Thousands of people are waiting to use the telescope. This is a huge undertaking. There will be a lot of people biting their nails tomorrow.
