The James Webb Space Telescope
An infrared observatory a million miles out looks at the first galaxies.
- When
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Launched on Christmas Day 2021 after two decades of delays and cost overruns, JWST unfolds a 6.5-metre segmented mirror and a tennis-court-sized sunshield at the second Lagrange point — a sequence of hundreds of single-point failures, all of which worked. Its infrared sensitivity reaches galaxies from within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, several of which appear more massive and mature than models predicted.