James Webb Space Telescope successfully launches after years of delay

“Milestone achieved,” the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in a tweet after the launch, adding that the telescope was “safely in space, operating and communicating with ground controllers.”

For scientists around the world, the Sun-orbiting observatory – the largest, most powerful instrument ever built of its type – will herald a new era of exploration in space. A hundred times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb will help astronomers look at some of the oldest galaxies and stars in the universe, search for signs of the potential for habitable atmospheres of planets outside our solar system and mysterious forces harnessing dark energy. will study. Its infrared sensor.

“What an emotional day,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The launch is “the beginning of one of the most amazing missions humanity has ever imagined,” he said.

The launch was delayed twice in recent weeks, first due to technical issues and then due to bad weather.

To fit it into the rocket’s 18-foot-wide, 56-foot-high nose cone, mission scientists had to fabricate the telescope’s gold-plated mirror — measuring 21.5 feet in diameter when fully positioned. In the form of 18 separate segments that have to be folded together like the petals of an origami flower.

Shortly after launch, the telescope successfully detached from the rocket and deployed its solar array so that it could begin generating electricity and charging its batteries, NASA said. Within the next 24 hours, mission scientists plan to command Webb to course-correct using an on-board rocket so that it becomes four times as far away as the Moon’s second Lagrange point.

Then, the complex disclosure process will begin, which will take about two weeks to complete. Seventy hinges, 90 cables, 140 releases and 400 pulleys would be involved in opening the telescope’s tennis court-sized sunshield by issuing commands to Webb from Earth. Webb would then open the two wings of its primary mirror and lock them in place.

“Now we have to realize that there are still myriad things that have to be worked out, and they have to be fully worked out. But we know that with great reward comes great risk,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

There are 344 “single-point failure” items in the web. A single-point failure is a piece of equipment or a part of a system that, if failed, could sabotage the entire mission.

About 80% of those items are associated with sunshield deployment. If a deployment mechanism goes bad, or the sunshield is worn out as soon as it’s exposed, there’s no way to fix it from earth.

But even if a malfunction occurs, it doesn’t mean that the Web will become a $10 billion space junk.

“There are enough redundancies that everything will be fine,” said Michael Maseda, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If one thing doesn’t work it won’t abort the mission entirely.”

A malfunction could affect Webb’s ability to see weak stars or galaxies.

“Even with the web at 90%, we’re still going to see things we’ve never seen before,” he said.

Webb will take 29 days to reach the second Lagrange point. There it will orbit the Sun, 1 million miles from Earth, until at least 2026.

If all goes well, Webb could begin its first science experiment about six months after launch and is expected to present its first picture this summer. That’s the time it takes to fully open and align its mirrors, to calibrate its cameras and infrared light spectrograph, and to cool the telescope to its operating temperature. The telescope was jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Webb’s mission is expected to last at least five years, although it will likely be 10, Dr. Maseda said. That timeline is constrained by the amount of fuel on Webb—the fuel needed to keep the telescope in its proper orbit and pointed in the direction astronomers want it.

Webb is designed to complement Hubble, which has been orbiting Earth since its launch in 1990, which was planned for a 15-year mission. A series of technical issues forced it to shut down twice this year.

“Hubble is really elderly,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

If the Webb mission fails and Hubble stops working, “it would mean that there is a gap in our capabilities and we could be without a major space telescope for some time,” he said.

Presumably, the next space telescope to be launched is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which won’t be ready until the mid-2020s.

“These big projects have a history that success begets success,” said Robert Smith, a historian of astronomy at the University of Alberta in Canada. “If Webb is a resounding success, and there’s no reason to think it won’t if everything works out, that makes future major missions all the more likely.”