Print

[Bozardi]

[*quote*]
Annals of AstronomyAugust 16, 2021 Issue
NASA’s New Telescope Will Show Us the Infancy of the Universe

Twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope will enable scientists to see deeper into the past than ever before.
By Rivka Galchen
August 9, 2021

Next month, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to take a slow boat from Los Angeles, spend a few days traversing the Panama Canal, and arrive at a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The telescope will have been twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making. Thousands of scientists and engineers from fourteen countries will have worked on it. It could have flown, sure, but it’s a tight squeeze—plus the telescope weighs seven tons, and Kourou’s airfield is connected to its spaceport by seven bridges not built to endure such a load. The telescope will be put into Ariane 5, a European rocket named for a mythical princess who helped a man she loved defeat the Minotaur and escape a maze. Ariane 5 will carry the telescope some ten thousand kilometres in thirty minutes. The J.W.S.T. will then continue on its own, for twenty-nine days, toward a lonely, lovely orbit in space, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, where we will never visit it, though it will stay in constant communication with us. From Earth, it will appear ten thousand times fainter than the faintest star.

On its way, the telescope will slowly unfurl five silvery
[...]
[*/quote*]

More unfolding:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/16/nasas-new-telescope-will-show-us-the-infancy-of-the-universe