There's redundancy for every electrical system, but if something goes wrong (as happened early on with the Hubble Space Telescope), the telescope will be too far away to send up any servicing missions. It will sail past the moon into an orbit known as L2, which will have it continually on the far side of the moon, at a gravitationally stable place that will block out much of the sun's light. With a 14 billion year old universe, that sort of power will make Webb see, essentially, to the boundary of visible time and space.Ĭome October 2018, the telescope will launch from ESA's launch complex in French Guyana on board an Ariane rocket.

The most distant galaxy ever found, EGSY8p7, has a redshift of 8.68, and is 13.2 billion light years away. The higher the redshift, the more distant an object is.įor instance, the 'Sombrero Galaxy' is 28 million light years from us, and has a redshift of about 0.004.

Located in the midst of the primary mirror, the Near InfraRed Camera, Near InfraRed Spetragraph, Mid-Infrared Instrument, and Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph will watch the skies in different wavelengths.īy studying in and around the infrared spectrum, the telescope will be able to spot hotter objects, as well as see to a redshift of 15. The mirrors are the light gathering eyes for the telescope, but it's up to four instruments under the hood to make use of what those eyes see. After their initial fabrication, the mirrors were shaved until 92 percent of the beryllium was turned back into dust and sent back for reuse. Each of those mirrors weighs 21 kilograms, which is 10 times lighter than the 2.5 meter primary mirror on Hubble. 'We had to make it lighter in order for the rocket to bring it up,' Lee Feinberg, JWST optical telescope element manager, said. Each mirror has separate actuators to control its movements, and the surface of the primary mirror reflects to the secondary mirror, located at the end of the long booms visible in the photo below.

The mirrors are made out of berylium, a lightweight metal. Just last week, the final segment of the primary mirror was installed, paving the way for the whole craft to come together in time for its 2018 launch. But that's the thing: NASA has to think that far ahead, whether it's to develop new technologies, to test out the feasibility of ideas, or simply to gather the political support behind its big, ambitious projects.Īfter a number of other plans came and went (including one that would have seen the telescope placed beyond the orbit of Mars to the outskirts of the asteroid belt), but the final design arrived in 2010. Work on the James Webb Space Telescope began in 1996, not too many years after the launch of Hubble. However, the Earth's atmosphere prevents us from studying smaller planets, and seeing many more types of molecules. 'We have had success in detecting a few different molecules in the atmospheres of Jupiter-sized planets via ground-based telescopes over the past several years. 'I'd say the James Webb Space Telescope's main impact will be the ability to study the atmospheres of exoplanets in detail, down to sizes just a bit bigger than the Earth,' Jeff Coughlin, a researcher on NASA's planet finding Kepler mission, said in an email. Webb will also get unprecedented looks into star formation, find other planets in the process of forming, answer some of the biggest cosmic mysteries we've encountered to date, and directly examine the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system in a search for habitability. 'With Webb, what we want to do is peer beyond the veil of Hubble and see the first galaxies forming,' Amber Straughn, a NASA astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center, said during a press event around the telescope.īut it's not just for finding galaxies shortly after their formation became possible. But why build something so big? Well, that's what you need to do if you want to see the beginning of the universe. The whole thing is, in fact, so big that it will take two-and-a-half weeks from launch to fully unfurl in outer space, and another few months to come completely online. The base of the craft is as long as a tennis court. The mirror section, comprising the main optics of the telescope, is about three stories tall, comprised of 18 mirrors, each 4.5 feet tall, all tiled together. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to be big in every conceivable way.

New biggest telescope