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The $10 billion space telescope is for Christmas.
The Ariane 5 rocket was launched from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The James Webb Space Telescope, and the hopes and dreams of countless astronomy, astrophysicists and planetary scientists around the world, will be carried into the final frontier by the ship.
If all goes according to plan, the huge telescope will peer at the universe's first stars and galaxies, sniff the atmospheres of nearby alien planets and perform a variety of other high-profile, high-impact work over the next five to 10 years.
The Arianespace-built rocket carrying the space telescope separated from it about half an hour later. Cheers erupted at launch control as live views of the solar array reached Earth.
The Arianespace flight controller rang a cheer for the NASA broadcast.
The James Webb Space Telescope works in pictures.
James Webb Space Telescope has live updates.
3 of 3 are images
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space in December of 2021. The image is from NASA TV.
The Ariane 5 rocket with the James Webb Space Telescope Launch will disappear into the clouds in French Guiana on December 25, 2021. The image is from NASA.
The James Webb Space Telescope deploys its solar array after leaving the Ariane 5 rocket. The image is from NASA TV.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told Space.com last week that this is a one-of-a-kind mission. It is the most advanced technology that is going to open up secrets of the universe that will be just stupendous, if not almost overwhelming, providing a quantum leap of understanding of who we are, how we got here, what we are and how did.
"If successful" is a requirement for every mission. It seems necessary given the observatory's importance.
"Webb is the most complex thing that NASA has ever done," Jonathan Gardner, a deputy senior project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com. It's the biggest pure science project the United States has ever done.
Thirty years of work.
More than three decades have passed since the beginning of the project. A group of Astronomers met at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore in September 1989 to discuss a possible successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble hadn't even launched yet, but big space telescopes take a long time to plan and build, so the astronomy community tends to think a decade or two in advance. There was a strong desire to minimize the chance of a long observing gap between Hubble and the NGST, as the successor was informally called.
The first images the scope returned were disappointingly blurry, and it soon became apparent that something was very wrong. Robert Smith, a history professor at the University of Alberta in Canada who has written extensively about Hubble and other astronomy missions, said that this unexpected development had a chilling effect on planning for the NGST.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is seen during sun shield deployment tests. The image was taken by NASA/Chris Gunn.
Smith said during a presentation last week with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group that things weren't moving very much as a consequence. The priority was to fix Hubble.
In December 1993 astronauts did a spacewalk to fix a flaw in Hubble's primary mirror. Smith said the fix allowed NGST work to move forward again, but more than three years of planning time had been lost or at least compromised.
The NGST should study the very early universe according to a consensus by the mid 1990s. The universe was just one billion years old when Hubble provided a look at it. The astronomy community wanted to go back to the very first stars and galaxies, which formed within the first few hundred million years of the universe's existence.
The James Webb Space Telescope is being built.
The new scope should be more focused on detecting and analyzing heat than it is on looking at optical and ultraviolet light. The universe's ongoing expansion has stretched the optical and UV emissions from the first stars and galaxies so much that they are now seen in longerInfrared wavelengths. The clouds of dust and gas that pepper the universe are more easily penetrated by the light from the IR.
The new observatory would need to be big to collect enough deep-space photons to study. The original concept called for a primary mirror that was at least 4 m wide. The NGST team was encouraged by Daniel Goldin to think bigger, and a mirror was part of the plan.
Smith said that the basic design of the NGST was in place by 1996. Researchers estimated that the observatory would cost $1 billion and launch in 2007. We can now see that the figures were very optimistic.
The expected price tag had ballooned to $5 billion by 2010 and the launch had been delayed a bit. The mirror's diameter had been reduced to between 6 and 6.5 m. There was a feeling that the mission could end up starving other NASA astrophysics projects, a feeling captured in a 2010 story in the journal Nature called "The telescope that ate astronomy."
The low point was in July of 2011. The project was fought for by scientists and influential politicians, but it was stopped a few months later.
The universe is in 10 easy steps.
A huge eye on the sky.
It was always going to be a big machine. Its goals dictated a lot.
The telescope must keep its scientific instruments very cold, as any significant thermal emission from them would swamp the faintIR signals. The observatory's operating temperature is around minus 220 degrees Celsius, which is the lowest temperature that can be achieved by the observatory.
Each sheet of the sun shield is the size of a tennis court. The Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 is a location where the sun is 930,000 miles from Earth.
NASA officials wrote in an L2 explainer that the telescope can stay in line with the Earth as it moves around the sun. The telescope can be protected from the light and heat of the sun and Earth.
L2 is too far away for astronauts to visit, so the giant new scope will be on its own.
The sun shield and primary mirror are too wide to fit inside the protective nose cone of the Ariane 5 or any other currently operational rocket. Both elements were launched today in a compact configuration and will unfold during Webb's stay in space.
The sun will be 1 million miles from Earth. The image is from the European Space Agency.
The mirror consists of 18 hexagonal segments, each of which is made of beryllium and coated with a thin layer of gold. Hubble's single-piece primary mirror weighs about one-sixth the light-collecting area of those 18 pieces. The total mass of James Webb is 14,300 pounds, which is a little over half that of Hubble.
Four scientific instruments will be used to analyze the photons grabbed by the mirror.
This quartet will allow him to see for a long time. The telescope will detect 10 billion times fainter than the dimmest star in the night sky, if all goes according to plan. That is 10 to 100 times fainter than anything Hubble can pick up. They said that it will be so sharp that it will be able to see the size of a penny from 24 miles away.
It took a lot of time and money to develop this advanced scientific and engineering tech. Even more was done to make sure that it will work as planned once it is in space.
He told Space.com that they had to put everything through a series of tests before putting it in a vacuum chamber.
All of the testing was done to make sure that it would work. Sometimes the testing would find something, and we'd have to redo the test. It took so long because that happened a few times.
The prime contractor for the mission was NASA, and they led the testing campaign. The European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency are major partners. CSA contributed the FGS/NIRISS instrument, as well as launch services, NIRSpec and MIRI's optical system.
The project was impacted by COVID-19. The launch date was pushed back from March to October because of the coronaviruses.
Fourteen years later than anticipated, the ground was finally broken today. The final price tag was higher than expected. It's not out of bounds for a big and complex space mission to cost that much. Hubble's cumulative cost was estimated by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine at $11.3 billion in 2015.
There is a lot of work to be done before the massive scope can start its science work.
It will take about a month for Webb to get to L2. The journey will be an action-packed one for the team, which will be guiding the telescope through a series of crucial deployment.
The unfurling of the sun shield will be the most nerve-racking move, and it will happen in the first week after launch. NASA officials said in an explainer video that the sun shield system has 140 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assembly, 400 pulleys, 90 cables, and eight deployment motors, all of which need to perform correctly to get the five thin membranes extended.
It will be no picnic to deploy the 18 mirror segments properly. The surface of the mirror needs to be aligned with an accuracy of 150 nanometers to work as planned. A strand of human DNA is about 2.5 nanometers wide.
"One of our scientists calculated that we move the mirrors slower than grass grows as we're lining them up so precisely," she said.
If you enjoy dwelling on things that could go wrong, there are plenty of other things that could go wrong as well.
Nelson said there are still 300 things that have to work perfectly for it to be successful.
It will take about six months to get all of the systems and instruments up to speed, and regular science operations are expected to begin in the summer of 2022.
At least the next five years will be spent observing the universe, on a variety of projects proposed by scientists around the world.
The mission's core goals include searching for the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, shining light on the evolution of the stars and planet formation, and helping to conjugate nearby exoplanet systems, which may be capable of supporting life.
Hubble is an incredibly versatile machine. It will expand astronomer's understanding of our solar system and the broader universe in ways they cannot yet fully grasp.
"I think the most exciting things are things we didn't think of, and that will be unexpected," he said. That's the thrill of science.
Space.com senior writer, Chelsea Gohd, contributed to the story. " Out There" is a book about the search for alien life and was illustrated by Karl Tate. You can follow him on the social networking site. Follow us on social media.
