The James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space on the Ariane 5 rocket. She took off from the Kourou Cosmodrome in French Guiana. The launch was successful.
NASA broadcasted the telescope launch live:
The rocket brought the telescope into orbit and it successfully separated.
The telescope's solar panels were deployed for charging.
"Webb" for four weeks will move to its destination in the second point of Lagrange. It is located four times farther from the Earth than the Moon, at a distance of 1.5 million km on the side opposite to the Sun.
In the spring of 2021, NASA approved a list of 286 science programs as the first targets for James Webb. The telescope will explore exoplanets and disk media, galaxies, intergalactic and circumgalactic media, the large-scale structure of the Universe, the solar system, types of stars, planetary populations and the interstellar medium, as well as supermassive black holes.
The new telescope will observe light sources at wavelengths from 60 to 500 microns in the infrared spectrum. It will be able to focus light at distances of over 13.5 billion years when the first stars began to form.
It took more than two decades and almost $ 9 billion to develop and create this project, with an initial budget of $ 1 billion. This telescope is almost three times the size of the Hubble, and its scientific instruments are seven times more sensitive.
The James Webb launch was originally scheduled for December 18, but has been postponed several times. For the first time while attaching the folded satellite to the payload adapter of the launch vehicle, an unplanned release of one of the locking strap clamps occurred. The tape had to be held until the telescope was disconnected in space. Later, NASA specialists checked James Webb and confirmed that the tape incident did not affect the performance of the equipment.
Then NASA pushed the launch date to December 24 due to an incident with the connection between the telescope and the launch vehicle. Then the launch of the orbiting telescope was postponed to December 25, 2021 due to weather conditions
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