- NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built, was launched on December 25, 2021 from French Guiana on the European Ariane 5 rocket.
- The telescope has been named after James Webb, the second administrator in NASA’s history. He was instrumental in the Apollo programs.
- Primarily an infrared telescope, JWST will have a wider spectrum view than Hubble and operate further out from the Earth, in a solar orbit.
- JWST will take pictures ten times sharper than Hubble, but hundreds of times deeper.
- Hubble is about 340 miles above the Earth surface, whereas JWST will be over a million miles away.
- Powerful space telescopes are often called time-machines because of their ability to view very faraway objects. The light coming from those objects, stars or galaxies, which is captured by these telescopes, began its journey millions of years earlier. Telescopes, like JWST or the Hubblesee, captures images of these stars or galaxies as they were millions of years ago. The more distant the planet or star, the farther back in time are the telescopes able to see.
- The telescope will be used to look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago.
- The JWST telescope has been equipped with instruments like NIRCam, NIRSpec, MIRI, FGS/NIRISS.
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