NASA's James Webb Space Telescope set for blastoff to study universe's origin

NASA’s $10 billion telescope James Webb Space Telescope designed to capture the first glimpse of the universe just shortly after the Big Bang is targeted for blastoff from the European Space Agency's Kourou, French Guiana, launch site at 7:20 am EST on Saturday, December 25 on Christmas. The revolutionary world’s first-of-its-kind space-science observatory of the next decade will capture the earliest galaxies believed to have formed during the early universe’s formation. The new telescope will help scientists to probe the structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.

“Webb will capture light, stretched over space and time into long infrared wavelengths, from the universe’s first stars and galaxies. Once the spacecraft has fully unfolded in space and begun collecting data, it will provide an unprecedented window into our universe’s deep past,” NASA explained in a release. 

But right after the launch, Webb will unfold a tennis-court-size sun shield that will block MIRI and the other instruments from the Sun’s heat, allowing them to cool passively. Beginning about 77 days after launch, MIRI’s cryocooler will spend 19 days lowering the temperature of the instrument’s detectors to less than 7 kelvins.

Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope onboard, is rolled out to the launch pad. [Credit: NASA]

“It’s relatively easy to cool something down to that temperature on Earth, typically for scientific or industrial applications,” said Konstantin Penanen, a cryocooler specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California which manages the MIRI instrument for NASA.

“But those Earth-based systems are very bulky and energy inefficient."

For a space observatory, explains Penanen, a cooler instrument that is needed that is physically compact, highly energy-efficient, and it has to be highly reliable because we can’t go out and repair it. "So those are the challenges we faced, and in that respect, I would say the MIRI cryocooler is certainly at the cutting edge.” 

Watch launch of  James Webb Space Telescope [JWST]  LIVE on Dec. 25, Saturday 

• 3 am: Update on the fueling of the Ariane 5 rocket for the James Webb Space Telescope launch
• 3:15 am: James Webb Space Telescope highlights and launchpad views from Kourou, French Guiana
• 6 am:   Coverage of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope on an Ariane 5 rocket f
• 9 am:  Webb Space Telescope post-launch briefing from Kourou, French Guiana

The 7.2-ton James Webb Space Telescope [JWST] which will launch off the northeastern coast of South America atop an Ariane 5 rocket has been designed to capture starlight from the first galaxies and will be the largest telescope NASA has ever put into orbit. One of Webb’s big science goals will be to study the properties of the first generation of stars to form in the universe.

This portion of the MIRI instrument, seen here at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK contains the infrared detectors. The cryocooler is positioned far from the detectors because it operates at a higher temperature. A tube carrying cold helium connects the two sections. [Credits: NASA/Science and Technology Facilities Council/STFC]

[Credits: NASA/Chris Gunn; Text Credit: NASA/Laura Betz]

Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam instrument, will be able to detect these extremely distant objects, and MIRI will help scientists confirm that these faint sources of light are clusters of first-generation stars, rather than second-generation stars that form later as a galaxy evolves, explains NASA. 

This Hubble’s successor took more than 10,000 scientists work hours and nearly 20 years to be developed and will replace the Hubble observatory deployed by NASA for 31 years but was last serviced in 2009. Hubble had entered the partial-shutdown “safe mode” several times over the last few years, and might only remain in operation through the end of the decade. 

Fitted with more than 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments —NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is approximate twice the size of the Hubble’s, and nearly 60 times larger in area than the Spitzer Telescope, the premier infrared light observatory that was launched in 2003 and retired in 2020. The telescope will record more than 458 gigabits of data daily which will be routed through NASA’s Deep Space Network and later transmitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

[Credit: NASA]

'Orbital home': L2 Lagrange point 930,000 miles from Earth

NASA’s revolutionary telescope will head to its orbital home at the L2 Lagrange point 930,000 miles from Earth and has a four-point mission which includes searching for light from the earliest post-Big Bang stars, studying the formation and development of galaxies, examining the evolution of stars and planetary systems, and seeking out the origins of life, according to NASA. 

A mission this complex faces many challenges says NASA – not least the delicate operation of unfolding its instruments in space. But as the mission readies for launch, operators must evaluate some prominent risks such as space weather, the fluctuating, sometimes dangerous conditions in space driven by the Sun. “Impacts of space weather come in many forms and can cause problems for what we’re doing,” said Jim Spann, space weather lead at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We’re going to have to pay a lot of attention to space weather.” 

But one of the biggest threats to spacecraft after launch is the Van Allen radiation belts. This pair of doughnut-shaped rings of high-energy particles encircles Earth, trapped in place by our planet’s magnetic field. The final risk during the telescope’s journey would be solar energetic particles or SEPs. SEPs are the speediest solar particles: electrons and protons from the Sun that travel thousands of miles per second.