The James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary equipment designed to provide mankind with the first-ever peek into an infant universe as it existed when the earliest galaxies are thought to have formed, is scheduled to launch on Saturday. According to an official release, the instrument, hailed as the ‘leading space-science observatory of the next decade’, by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will be launched on December 25 from the northeastern coast of South America.
With the telescope bundled inside the cargo bay area, French-built Ariane 5 rocket will blast off from the ESA’s launch base in French Guiana at 1220 GMT (5:50pm Indian Standard Time). The 14,000-pound instrument will be released after a 26-minute ride into space, and it will expand to nearly the size of a tennis court.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as Nasa’s flagship astrophysics mission. It is named after James Edwin Webb, the American space agency’s chief during most of the agency’s formative decade in the 1960s. The new space telescope is 100 times more sensitive than Hubble, and it is intended to revolutionise scientists’ knowledge of the cosmos and our place within it.
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