NASA Announces Launch Date for James Webb Space Telescope

Asmaa Lamnawar wrote on Thursday, September 9, 2021 at 10:16 am – US space agency “NASA” revealed on Wednesday the launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA said the telescope, which astronomers hope will usher in a new era of discovery, will launch on December 18.

The $ 10 billion observatory, a joint project of US, European and Canadian space agencies, will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from the French Guiana space station.

The telescope is currently located at a facility in Redondo Beach, California, United States of America, and is awaiting shipment.

“This project is an exemplary mission that exemplifies perseverance,” Gregory Robinson, NASA’s James Webb Telescope Program Manager, said in a statement.

“We are very honored to launch NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into orbit with Ariane, a predecessor of Arianespace and the European Space Team,” said Stefan Israel, CEO of Ariane Space.

Researchers want to use the largest and most powerful space telescope of all time to dive into the deep past over 13.5 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies that formed a few hundred years ago. million years after the Big Bang.

The main advantage of this telescope is its ability to detect infrared radiation, because by the time the light from the first objects reaches the telescopes, it has moved to the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum due to the expansion of the universe.

The existing space telescope, “Hubble”, has limited infrared capability.

Astronomers also hope that the James Webb Space Telescope will advance the discovery of alien worlds.

The first planets orbiting other stars were discovered in the 1990s, and more than 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed.

A few days ago, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected a space object made up of six light points known as the astonishing “Einstein’s Ring” 3.4 billion light years from Earth .

This cosmic display, officially known as the “gravitational lens,” occurs when the gravitational field of a huge space body twists and deflects light from a distant object behind it, then produces a bull’s-eye pattern or “Einstein ring”, which was predicted by the famous physicist Albert Einstein in 1915.