NASA’s Webb telescope takes flight—a Christmas gift to astronomers everywhere
Excerpt: Infrared scope will target alien worlds and the universe’s first galaxies—if it survives a month of nerve-racking maneuvers ...The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, an instrument expected to revolutionize astronomy by gathering light from the atmospheres of alien worlds and the universe’s first galaxies, launched at 7:20 a.m. EST on a sultry Christmas morning from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana. Some 30 minutes after launch, the telescope detached from the top of its Ariane 5 rocket and deployed its solar array, which is needed to charge its batteries and support communication with Earth. Webb is now en route to its observing station, a gravitational balance point known as L2 at 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Before it gets there, mission controllers will have a tense month, as they unfurl parts of the telescope too large to fit inside the rocket fairing, including its tennis court–size sunshield and 6.5-meter-wide mirror. Until those are successfully deployed and Webb’s four instruments are chilled and tested, astronomers will not rest easy. ...Webb’s ambitious science goals required numerous technological firsts in its design, such as a folding mirror made of 18 hexagonal gold-plated segments, and instruments chilled to just 7° above absolute zero (–266°C). That complexity led to schedule slips totaling 10 years and a cost that ballooned from $2 billion to about five times as much.…