NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launches in French Guiana

NASA’s revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope is finally in space, decades after it was first conceived as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Webb, charged with seeing deeper into the universe than any telescope ever built, blasted off at 7:20 a.m. Saturday from the European Space Agency’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on South America’s northeast coast.

At launch, the $10 billion telescope, NASA’s long-delayed successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, was folded up upon itself and fully enveloped, unseen, in the cone of Arianespace’s heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket, which rolled to the launchpad Thursday.

Less than half an hour after launch, it had separated from the rocket and was traveling at 22,000 miles per hour, destined for deep space and, as NASA put it, “flying on its own in coast phase.”

Early reports indicated that everything was “nominal” - precisely the space-jargon term that the thousands of people who have worked on the mission were hoping to hear on launch day.

“It was a perfect ride to orbit,” announced Rob Navias, NASA’s launch commentator.

The separation from the final booster provided a stunning - and, for humanity, probably the final - view of the Webb as it hurtled from the Earth, the imagery caught by a camera on the upper stage of the rocket. There are no cameras on the Webb, but a camera atop the final booster showed the telescope backdropped by the Earth, and solar panels extending successfully from the spacecraft. That critical deployment ensured the telescope will have power.

“There it is. There is your critical call. James Webb not only has legs, it has power,” Navias said. “Quite a Christmas present for the world’s astronomers.”

At a news conference in Kourou after the successful launch, NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen highlighted that image of the telescope receding into space: “For me that picture will be burned into my mind forever.”

There are many more high-anxiety moments ahead for the Webb, but the launch and the deployment of the solar arrays was greeted with cheers at the the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which houses the Mission Operations Center for the Webb. Engineers and technicians at the institute took over operational command Saturday after the launch team in French Guiana concluded its task.

“I did not breathe, I don’t think, until the solar arrays came out,” said Pam Melroy, the deputy NASA administrator, who watched the launch from the institute.

This was not supposed to be a Christmas launch. The launch date had been Dec. 18, but a technical mishap at the spaceport - a large clamp coming loose and jostling the telescope - required a four-day delay to ensure that nothing had been damaged. Another glitch with an essential cable delayed the launch for two days, to Dec. 24. Then came a one-day weather delay.

Melroy said the arrival of the holiday season in combination with the omicron variant spreading so rapidly led to “challenging” discussions about the launch schedule. But when the launch shifted to Christmas Eve, NASA felt that the holiday was sufficiently affected that it made sense to launch on the first possible day rather than push it off further, Melroy said.

She put a positive spin on it: “It’s not bad that it’s happening on Christmas Day, which should be a day of hope and inspiration.”

The predawn streets and elevated highways of Baltimore were empty, but by 6 a.m. the Space Telescope Science Institute was bustling. Some news media and scientists dropped out in recent days as the omicron variant of the coronavirus has spread, and the hoopla was limited. Visitors were handed KN95 masks and told to take rapid coronavirus tests.

Saturday morning’s pre-launch event at the institute began with remarks by Webb team members, including representatives of Europe’s and Canada’s space agencies. The speakers emphasized the historic nature of the telescope and its potential for answering fundamental questions about the history of the cosmos.

“Look farther, delve deeper and measure more precisely, and you’re bound to detect something new and wondrous,” said Kenneth Sembach, director of the telescope institute. “It is a gift to everyone who contemplates the vastness of the universe.”

Melroy echoed that: “When we see things with a new lens, we gain new knowledge and new perspectives that can change fundamentally how we see the universe and how we see ourselves.”

The rocket will send the telescope far beyond Earth’s gravity well, and into a gravitationally stable position known as L2, where the telescope will orbit the sun and remain roughly a million miles from Earth on the opposite side of our planet from the sun.

The journey to L2 will take about 29 days. Along the way, the Webb will undergo course corrections and a series of critically important deployments of its hardware, including a sun shield the size of a tennis court.

After the sun shield opens up, NASA will send a command from Earth to unfold 18 gold-plated, hexagonal mirrors, which together will function as a 21-meter light bucket, nearly three times the diameter of the Hubble’s mirror.

This is a novel design, driven by ambitious scientific objectives.

NASA and its partners must overcome 344 potential single point failures, according to an independent review board. That list began with launch, although the Ariane 5 has an excellent track record.

Zurbuchen, who was in French Guiana for the launch, said last month that the agency has tested the telescope and its instruments thoroughly.

“We’ve gone through every systematic analysis that we can think of,” he said.

The Webb, named for NASA’s administrator at the height of the 1960s Space Race, traces its scientific roots to the 1980s, and has been under development since the mid-1990s. It has struggled through multiple delays, and survived one congressional attempt to terminate the mission as its cost soared.

“It’s been a long road, as many of you know, to get where we are. Even so, we planned such a revolutionary telescope that it has stood the test of this time,” planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel said Thursday during a NASA science webinar on the goals on the mission.

The Webb is an infrared telescope, capturing wavelengths outside the spectral range of the Hubble Space Telescope. With the sprawling sun shield protecting it from the sun’s heat, and with additional help from cooling devices, the Webb will take advantage of extremely cold temperatures, below minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit.

It is designed to see the oldest stars in the universe and scrutinize the formation of the earliest galaxies. It will also study the atmospheres of exoplanets that orbit stars in our galaxy.

It can even look at nearby neighbors, such as Jupiter - where scientists still want to know why the Great Red Spot on the planet is red, Hammel said. Two other targets are Jupiter’s intriguing moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, both of which have geysers believed to signal the presence of subsurface oceans.

“If we can put our beam there and detect organics in this plume material that may give us clues to the habitability of subsurface oceans,” Hammel said.

It will take about six months for NASA and its partners to fully commission the telescope and begin delivering the promised images from deep space. In addition to the well-publicized challenges of deploying the sun shield and the mirrors, the spacecraft has to cool itself to extremely low temperatures. The individual mirrors can be adjusted to achieve the kind of resolution that should make the Webb roughly 100 times more powerful than the Hubble.

So a lot of work is still ahead - but Saturday was a giant leap for a telescope that at times looked like it might never get off the ground.

“Tens of thousands of people have committed over 20 years or more on a single project,” Matt Mountain, an astronomer who is part of the team that designed the telescope, said at the telescope institute just minutes before launch Saturday. “And why? Why have they committed this time? We solve incredibly hard problems. It’s part of the human spirit. We’re curious. We explore.”