#James webb telescope launch date early plus#

#James webb telescope launch date early plus#

For Webb this means unfolding and positioning the 18 hexagonal segments of the primary mirror, plus a secondary mirror, to a precision of 25 billionths of a meter.Īlso, Webb will be observing infrared light, so it must be kept incredibly cold (roughly -233℃) to maximize its sensitivity.

For a large telescope to produce the sharpest images possible, the mirror's surface needs to be aligned along a curve with extreme precision. Second, there were two major engineering marvels to accomplish with Webb. This is an approximation of the path Webb will take at the L2 point, as it orbits around the Sun and Earth. With size comes complexity, as the entire structure needed to be folded to fit inside the nose cone of an Ariane rocket. Why did it take nearly 30 years, and more than US$10 billion (roughly A$14 billion), to get Webb off the ground?įirst, it's the largest telescope ever put into space, with a gold-coated mirror 6.5m in diameter (compared with Hubble's 2.4m mirror). And when the project was originally conceived in the 1990s, the goal was to launch before 2010.

In 2012, I wrote an article for The Conversation looking forward to the launch of Webb, and reminiscing about the amazing early days of its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.īack then, Webb's planned launch date was in 2018. Now the astronomical community- including my team of Swinburne University astronomers-is preparing for a new epoch of major discoveries. This is a point in space about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth (in the opposite direction from the Sun) where the gravity from both the Sun and Earth help to keep an orbiting satellite balanced in motion. Right around the time this article is published, it's expected Webb will have reached a place called the Earth-Sun second Lagrange point, or L2.