The highly sensitive but expensive James Webb Telescope was launched into space after a few days of delay. The telescope should bring us ever closer to the origin of the universe.
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope was originally scheduled for Wednesday, then postponed to Friday, but has now been launched into space at 1.20 pm Belgian time from the European launch site Kourou in French Guiana, NASA announced. The launch can be continued directly.
The extra few days of delay can also be added, because in over two decades of working on the task, it has almost become synonymous with delay. “We don’t take risks with Webb” — the mission is a collaboration between the United States, Europe and Canada,” NASA CEO Thomas Zurbuchen said last week at an ESA press conference online. “We have to make absolutely sure that everything is working properly.”
Everything went according to plan, allowing the telescope to successfully separate from the launch vehicle after about 28 minutes. After that, it will take about a month to get into a proper orbit around the sun.
Once the largest and most expensive space telescope ever made, its distinctive honeycomb mirror appears. Astronomers and cosmologists have ten years to look at the universe using the web.
What would the web be able to see with existing telescopes like Hubble blind or very nearsighted? Nothing more or less than the first stars and galaxies in the universe. It is believed to have formed several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Of course they have long since burned out and disappeared. But its light – the first starlight – still revolves around it. With us too, although in the meantime it has been extended into infrared light due to the expansion of the universe.
James Webb – named after the man who led NASA in the 1960s – should play a major role in the exploration of planets beyond our solar system, Exoplanets of which nearly five thousand have already been discovered.
