James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The ruthless space observatory took off from the European Spaceport launch place near Kourou, in French Guiana, on 25 December 2021 on a European Space Agency (ESA) Ariane 5 rocket, subsequent to a series of delays. Since the assignment was first envisioned in 1996, its costs have flooded from $0.5 billion to about $10 billion.

JWST was completely deployed on 8 January 2022 and reached its target on 24 January. On 16 March 2022, it focused all its mirrors on only star for the first time.

The JWST sits at a position further from Earth than Hubble, which orbits at an altitude of approximately 570km above Earth’s surface. The JWST sits in a Lagrange position between Earth and the sun, a position at which the gravitational pull among two orbiting bodies balance out, meaning something placed at that position can keep on there with little effort. There are five of these in the Earth-sun structure and the one the JWST will keep on at sits 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Earth, in the contradictory direction to the sun, called Lagrangian point 2 or L2.

Even though the JWST is often described as a stand-in for Hubble, its capabilities vary slightly compared to the iconic telescope that came before it. As the Hubble Space Telescope looks frequently in the visual and ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, the JWST is looking at larger wavelengths, in the infrared.

JWST is designed in a different way to Hubble, with a set of 18 hexagonal shaped mirrors set in a honeycomb shape 6.5 meters across, compared to Hubble’s spherical 2.4 meter diameter primary mirror. This means James Webb Space Telescope has a 6.25 times larger surface area to collect light compared to the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST has upgraded cameras and is sheltered by a sun shield 22 by 12 meters wide.

HOW FAR BACK WILL WEBB SEE?

Webb will be able to see what the universe looked like about a quarter of a billion years (possibly back to 100 million years) after the Big Bang, when the initial stars and galaxies started to shape

It’s not promising to see the big bang because there was a dark period where light wasn’t active around. The Webb can just on see to the dark period.