Space telescope launched: "James Webb" is in space

The James Webb Space Telescope is in space.

This makes the most complex and expensive unmanned mission in space history to date on the way to its place of use.

The launch of the instrument, which cost a total of 9.7 billion dollars, was recently postponed several times and took place punctually today at 1:20 p.m. Central European Time from the European space center near Kourou in French Guiana.  

An Ariane 5 ECA rocket carried the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), folded under its tip, through the rain-clouded sky over the launch site in the tropical northeast of South America, three kilometers from the Atlantic coast. Two minutes and 21 seconds later, at a height of 70 kilometers, the two boosters - auxiliary engines with solid propellants - were blown off. Another minute later, at a height of 110 kilometers, the two halves of the payload fairing at the tip of the rocket detached as planned. Nine minutes after the start, the fuel for the first stage, consisting of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, was used up at an altitude of 200 kilometers and the upper stage, made in Bremen, took over.It brought the telescope out on an orbit out of the earth's gravitational field and was severed in turn 27 minutes after it took off. At this time, the scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, from where the JWST will be controlled, made radio contact with the telescope for the first time via a ground station of the European space organization ESA in Kenya.

Picture book start and scheduled flight course

The last step in the start-up phase was the unfolding of the solar panels to supply the telescope with energy minutes after separation from the upper level.

The Ariane 5's picture-perfect launch in Kourou was thus followed by an exactly scheduled flight.

This is further good news for astronomers, as it means that relatively little of the fuel on board the telescope has to be used for orbit corrections.

With the fuel saved, JWST can be operated all the longer.

The joint project of the American NASA, the European ESA and the Canadian space organization CSA will initially be in use for five years, but will have fuel for attitude control for ten years.

Scientists hope that the James Webb Telescope will provide, among other things, insights into the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago.

Objects in our solar system, the atmospheres of planets around other stars and the formation of new suns and their planetary systems are also to be examined.

The first data and images from the telescope are not expected until summer at the earliest. 

"On board this rocket are the hopes and dreams of tens of thousands of scientists who will benefit from the findings of this mission," said NASA Science Director Thomas Zurbuchen a few minutes before the start.

"We have never seen the universe the way Webb will show us."

The project was originally planned to start in the 1990s in 2007 and cost around $ 500 million. But then there were repeated problems and in 2011 it was on the verge of collapse due to more and more budget overruns.

Even if it now looks like a good end after the optimal start, the success of the project is far from certain. On Sunday the high-performance antenna will also be extended and the riskiest part of the mission will probably begin next Tuesday: the unfolding of the tennis court-sized sun shield, which extends over ten days in hundreds of individual steps, and the opening of the folded parts of the telescope, including its 6th 5-meter segmented primary mirror made of gold-plated beryllium. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, the JWST will use it to explore the universe in infrared light, i.e. in the spectral range of thermal radiation. Hence, it must be isolated from the warmth of the sun and earth.The huge sun shield and Webb's special orbit around the sun at the so-called L2 point at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth are used for this purpose. Webb will reach this position by the end of January. Only then will the scientists and engineers who designed and built Webb and thousands of astronomers around the world really breathe a sigh of relief.