360The James Webb Space Telescope is launched
On 25 December 2021, an Ariane 5 rocket launched the James Webb Space Telescope from Kourou, French Guiana. Built by NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies, it unfolded a 6.5 m gold-coated mirror on its way to a point 1.5 million km from Earth. Its first images, in July 2022, showed the early universe in astonishing detail.
The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to see in infrared light, which lets it look through dust clouds and detect light from the first galaxies, stretched by the expansion of the universe.
After years of delays, it was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, on 25 December 2021.
The telescope was too big to fit inside the rocket, so it was folded. Over two weeks, it unfolded a sunshield the size of a tennis court and a main mirror 6.5 m across, made of 18 gold-coated segments. Hundreds of steps had to work perfectly, and they did.
Webb settled in orbit around a point in space about 1.5 million km from Earth, on the side away from the Sun, where its sunshield keeps it extremely cold.
Its first full-colour images were released on 12 July 2022. Since then it has spotted some of the most distant galaxies ever seen and studied the atmospheres of planets around other stars.
- 1996
- Planning for the telescope begins
- 25 December 2021
- Webb is launched
- January 2022
- It reaches its orbit
- 12 July 2022
- The first images are released
Sources: NASA · European Space Agency · Canadian Space Agency.