The James Webb Space Telescope

The King of all Telescopes: James Webb Space Telescope

Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope was under the news spotlight, and rightly too. It is the largest space telescope ever built.

What is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)?

Fig. 1- The James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope is a space telescope which observes objects in distant space using infrared light. Its high resolution and sensitivity allow it to view objects too old, distant or faint for the Hubble to view. This will and has enabled investigations into many fields like cosmology, the first stars and galaxies etc.

The designing, development and building of the JWST was mainly carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of USA partnered with two main agencies; European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency.

It was developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore which is the same institute that manages and operates the Hubble Space Telescope.

This telescope is named after James E. Webb who was the administrator of NASA from 1961-1968 during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Fig. 2- One of JWST's first images.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guyana on 25 December 2021 and arrived at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point in January 2022. The first image captured by the JWST was released in a press conference on 11 July 2022.

This image is the edge of a nearby star forming region called NCG 3324 in the Carina Nebula. This image was captured by JWST using infrared light rays.

This guys, is only a sneak peek into the JWST. To find out more about it, follow this blog.

Thanking you,

Aarav Iyer

References: 

(1) Wikipedia (Fig. 1 + content)

(2) NASA (Fig. 2)