1. After years of delay, the most ambitious observatory ever built has at last left Earth. It now faces a high-stakes series of deployments in deep space.
2. The rocket carrying the largest, most ambitious space telescope in history cleared the launchpad in French Guiana.
3. Half an hour postlaunch, the telescope still needed to decouple from its host rocket, after which it had to deploy solar panels to partly power its journey.
4. As JWST separated from its rocket’s upper stage, a video feed showed the now independent spacecraft gleaming in sunlight, capturing one last close-up look at the observatory before its quest to pierce the veil of cosmic darkness took it inaccessibly far from Earth.
5. The moment JWST’s solar panels emerged, control of the mission officially shifted to Baltimore.
6. The telescope that would become JWST was already under discussion even before HST launched in April 1990. By orbiting Earth, HST would have a line of sight free of the optical distortions endemic to our planet’s atmosphere. It would therefore be able to see farther across the universe (and, given that the speed of light is finite, farther back in time) than any terrestrial telescope.
7. Even so, HST would be observing primarily in optical wavelengths—the tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can detect. The Next Generation Space Telescope (as the future JWST was then known) would be looking at the universe in infrared, the regime into which cosmic expansion would have stretched, or redshifted, visible light emitted more than 13 billion years ago.
8. JWST, however, will be able to see as far into the past as 100 million years after the big bang, a period when most matter consisted of only the primordial elements and was just beginning to coalesce into stars and galaxies. From the inception of JWST, the primary goal has been to glimpse these phenomena—the first luminous objects in the universe.
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