After numerous shifts, the James Webb Space Telescope has started. On December 25, 2021 around 1:20 p.m. German time, the space telescope of the superlative from the space station near Kourou, French Guyana, was withdrawn on board an Ariane 5 rocket. Now it is on the way to its observation post in space, which is around 1.5 million kilometers away, to find out from there from there. The way to the target orbit should take about four weeks.
"Webb has such transformative capabilities that I expect it will mark a new era — there will be a time before and a time after," NASA executive Jane Rigby said before the launch. Which technology is on board, when, how and where the telescope is to deploy in space and what goals the mission has, you can explore in the interactive multimedia story of .
With the help of a 25 square meter mirror, the JWST should provide new pictures from the early universe. Astrophysicists also want to observe the first galaxies created after the Big Bang. The approximately ten billion dollars-expensive cooperation between the US space agencies, Canada and Europe is thus acted as the successor to the Hubble telescope, which has been in use for more than 30 years and has given astronomers numerous knowledge of the cosmos.
At the end of the 1980s, the idea of such a telescope first came up, since then teams from NASA, ESA and CSA had planned and built. NASA photographer Chris Gunn has documented the progress, a selection of his images shows in a special presentation. But despite all the successes, things went wrong again and again, the planning was delayed, the originally estimated costs of around 500 million dollars could not be maintained and the entire project was in question again and again. The JWST was originally scheduled to start in 2007. 14 years later, it worked.
Until the first investigations will probably pass about seven months, first pictures are expected at the earliest for the summer of 2022. The lifespan of the James Webb is initially set at ten years.
