Once the telescope is in place, the challenge will be to fully deploy the mirror and a tennis-court-sized sun shield - a process that will take two weeks. It is so large that it had to be folded in order to fit into the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry it to its orbit. Its mirror measures 6.5 metres (21 feet) in diameter - three times the size of the one on the Hubble telescope - and is made of 18 hexagonal sections. The telescope is unequalled in size and complexity. "Even after 20 years, the questions Webb was made to answer are still just as pressing." Once the telescope is in place, the challenge will be to fully deploy the mirror and a tennis-court-sized sun shield Hubble and the Heritage Team ESA/HUBBLE/AFP/File The ESA has received over a thousand applications for just the first year of operation," he said. "Observation time is in very high demand. The ESA and the Canadian Space Agency collaborated on Webb and Ferruit like thousands of his colleagues has been working on it for most of his career.Īlready, he said, researchers are competing for access. "There's a lot of excitement - we've been waiting for this moment for a long time," Pierre Ferruit, a project scientist from the European Space Agency (ESA), told AFP. The ultimate goal is to find out whether Earth is unique or whether there are similar planets that could give rise to life. While we know some planets outside our solar system are the right distance from their stars to make them habitable, scientists also want to know what their atmospheres are like and whether they could contain water. It will also give new information about nearly 5,000 exoplanets. The Webb telescope will give new information about nearly 5,000 exoplanets Chris GUNN NASA/AFP/File "With Webb we hope to see these infant galaxies," she said, "and learn how galaxies grow over time." "This telescope is designed to answer the biggest questions in astronomy today," NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn said in a 2017 TED talk. Hubble is capable of observing events that happened in space some 500 million years after the Big Bang, and Webb can go back even further to around 200 million years after that event. "#JWST can see the heat signature of a bumblebee at the distance of the Moon," he tweeted.Īll that power is needed to detect the weak glow emitted billions of years ago by the very first galaxies to exist and the first stars being formed.
In a recent Tweet chat, cosmologist and astrophysicist John Mather, who co-founded the Webb project, described the telescope's unprecedented sensitivity. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, named for a former director of the American space agency, follows in the footsteps of the legendary Hubble - but intends to show humans what the Universe looked like even closer to its birth nearly 14 billion years ago.
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