James Webb Space Telescope Reached One Million Kilometers Last Station | New Spaces

In addition to stargazing, Webb explores the atmospheres of alien worlds to look for possible signs of life.

The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope reached its final destination a million kilometers from Earth on Monday, a month after launching to see the dawn of the universe.

By order, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched for nearly five minutes at a designated location to orbit the Sun, and NASA confirmed that the operation had gone as planned.

The $ 10 billion observatory mirrors need to be sharply aligned, and infrared detectors need to be sufficiently cooled before science observations begin in June. But flight attendants in Baltimore, USA, were euphoric after another hit.

“We are one step closer to discovering the mysteries of the universe. And I can’t wait for Webb to see the first new perspectives on the universe this summer! ” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.

The telescope will allow astronomers to look back in time more than ever before, until the first stars and galaxies formed 13.7 billion years ago. This is just 100 million years from the big bang, since the creation of the universe.

In addition to stargazing, Webb explores the atmospheres of alien worlds to look for possible signs of life.

The high-flying drama took off and started a few days later.

A sunscreen as large as a tennis court was deployed in the telescope in early January, on December 25, when it was fired from French Guiana and half a week away. The observatory’s gold mirror, 6.4 m (21 ft) wide, was opened a few days later.

Monday’s rocket launch put the telescope into orbit around the Sun at the second Lagrange point, where the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth are balanced. The seven-ton spacecraft is always facing the Earth at night to keep the infrared detectors as cool as possible.

1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) away, Webb is four times farther away than the moon.

As the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits up to 530 km (330 miles), Webb is too far away for emergency repairs. This makes the milestones of the last month even more critical — and the ones that are coming.

Space astronauts performed the operation on Hubble five times. The first operation, in 1993, corrected the blurred vision of the telescope, a mistake made in the construction of the mirror on the ground.