NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to finally launch soon

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NASA and its partners have been developing the James Webb Space Telescope for an unfathomable time, but we’re almost there. NASA has announced a launch date for the $ 10 billion telescope, and while it’s not the first, it looks doable as the telescope itself is complete and almost ready to ship to the site of launch. If all goes as planned, the Webb Telescope will take off on December 18, 2021. Of course, things rarely went as planned with this project.

Work on this Hubble successor began in the late 1990s, and it was originally only set to cost $ 500 million. This quickly doubled to $ 1 billion, and then it increased with each new budget. At first, NASA hoped Webb would be ready to launch in 2007, but didn’t refine it further. In 2019, NASA felt confident enough to set March 2021 for launch, but that date slipped, as did the later launch date of October 31. This is in large part thanks to delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has slowed work at NASA.

Last month, NASA announced that it had completed work on the telescope. All the components were installed and tested, so all that remained was to pack it up for transport to the launch site. The December launch will take place at the European Space Agency’s facilities in French Guiana, where it will be mated to an Ariane 5 rocket. Before the big moment, a team of engineers will take a detailed look at the hardware to ensure that it did not suffer any damage during the voyage, and also that many protective covers for the operations on the ground are removed.

Getting the telescope into space will be a major hurdle, but the telescope won’t be homeless when it leaves Earth behind. While Hubble is in low Earth orbit, Webb will travel approximately one million kilometers to the second point of the Earth-Sun Lagrange (L2). There, it will deploy its sun visor to keep its instruments cool, allowing it to peer deeper into the infrared than Hubble ever could. The main disadvantage of this localization is that the telescope will be too far away to be repaired if something goes wrong, as happened with Hubble.

When operational, the James Webb Space Telescope will be the most powerful observatory in human history. He will be able to see darker and more distant objects like the first galaxies and maybe even some exoplanets. People who have spent their careers building this spacecraft will undoubtedly be crossing their fingers on December 18th.

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