A Fresh Look into Universes Beyond our Planet with the James Webb Space Telescope

The universe is an unceasing curiosity, as astronomers and scientists work to unravel its mysteries and what lies beyond our planet. In this continuous endeavour, NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has set a revolutionary milestone on July 12th, 2022, revealing the deepest and sharpest infrared images of galaxies in the early universe dating back ore than 4.6 billion years, as never seen before.

Evolved from just an idea, the James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful and largest scientific observatory ever built! A successor to the Hubble telescope, Webb is the largest observatory in space that’s currently orbiting 1 million miles away from Earth. The ground breaking images of the universe we see today are made possible due to the hexagon shaped primary mirrors, which allow the telescope to collect large amounts of infrared light. It is protected by a five-layer sunshield which is roughly the area of a tennis court.

This mission is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It has been developed over 25 years with the joint contributions of thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians from 14 countries and 29 U.S. states.

The construction on Webb began in 2004, but it all started to come together in 2011, when all 18 mirror segments were finished, followed by Webb’s individual pieces that were built in a variety of locations, arrived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt,Maryland. Later in 2013, construction of the sunshield layers began. From late 2015 to early 2016, the telescope optics and structures were assembled, featuring a 21-foot (6.5-meter) mirror that was then shipped to NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, for end-to-end optical performance testing in a giant cryogenic temperature vacuum chamber. Finally,in 2018, the performance-verified telescope plus instrument assembly was delivered to Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, where the spacecraft bus and the sunshield assembly were being built and tested, and the following year, these two halves of Webb were connected. With everything in place, it was now time for the Webb to be folded to fit into Ariane 5, one of the world’s most reliable heavy lift vehicles capable of delivering Webb to its destination in space, and launched from Guiana Space Centre, located near the town of Kourou on December 25th, 2021.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a giant leap forward, geared to provide a new view of the universe, help us discover the scientifically significant questions about the early universe, and even look for signs of life on other planets outside our solar system, over the next 20 years of the mission.

Image Source:

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