NASA’s James Webb Telescope Launch Is About to Make History

The James Webb Space Telescope is FINALLY ready for launch. It’s taken over two decades, thousands of international scientists, and billions of dollars to get to this point.

Webb has been in the works since the mid-90s, and today is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and many other academic and industry partners. When it was first proposed, the telescope had one major goal: peer back 13.5 billion years to see the first galaxies. Light from those far-off galaxies has been stretched through our ever-expanding universe. By the time it reaches Webb’s mirrors, it’s stretched out of our visible light spectrum into the infrared region, so this is why Webb was designed to see infrared light.

Webb has a massive, eye-catching gold mirror. It’s made up of 18 smaller segments that will click into place after deployment and create a total surface area 6.5 meters across. For comparison, Hubble’s primary mirror is only 2.4 meters in diameter. And remember the temperature of Webb is also key, the telescope has to be kept really really cold. That’s because if a telescope is warm, it can emit its own infrared wavelengths and disrupt observations. So to keep Webb at a chilly 50 Kelvinengineers designed a tennis court-sized sunshield to block out light and heat from the Sun, Earth, and moon. To do this, the shield is made up of five layers, which insulate the telescope while allowing heat to escape between each layer.

Then there’s the infrared instruments themselves, which allow the telescope to do two things: observe objects that emit longer, redder wavelengths (like the earliest galaxies) and cut through the cosmic dust to see the nebula where stars and planets are forming. Using all this new and improved tech, Webb will be able to show us things we’ve never even seen before.

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