James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful space telescope ever constructed, took off on Saturday from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana to help researchers understand the origins of the universe and begin to answer key questions about our existence.
"We have LIFTOFF of the @NASAWebb Space Telescope! At 7:20 am ET (12:20 UTC), the beginning of a new, exciting decade of science climbed to the sky. Webb's mission to #UnfoldTheUniverse will change our understanding of space as we know it," NASA tweeted.
The USD 10bn project spanning over three decades, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, hopes to look further back in time than ever before - to find out more about the creation of the first stars and the beginnings of our Universe.
The truck-sized telescope aims to peer into the cosmos and farther back in time. Astronomers will also use the new telescope to probe black holes at the centers of galaxies, search for the chemical signatures of life on extrasolar planets and, closer to home, study the frozen oceans on moons at the edge of our own solar system.
The telescope will answer questions about the solar system, study exoplanets in new ways and look deeper into the universe than we've ever been able to. The telescope will travel for about a month until it reaches an orbit about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometres) away from Earth.
The telescope comes equipped with a segmented mirror that can extend 21 feet and 4 inches (6.5 meters) -- a massive length that will allow the mirror to collect more light from the objects it observes once the telescope is deployed in space.
The more light the mirror can collect, the more details the telescope can observe. Over the course of 29 days, Webb will unfold its mirrors and unfurl a protective sun shield the size of a tennis court. This process involves thousands of parts that must work perfectly in the right sequence.
The concept for the telescope was first imagined as a successor to Hubble at a workshop in 1989, and construction on Webb first began in 2004. Since then, thousands of scientists, technicians and engineers from 14 countries have spent 40 million hours building the telescope.
( With inputs from ANI )
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