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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched successfully at 7:20 AM today from the European Space Agency's (ESA) launch facility in French Guiana. I watched it live from a NASA YT channel. It looks like it was a perfect launch and perfect flight so far. This is very big news for space science and it's very nice to see many people from different countries come together to achieve something that will benefit all mankind. It was a joint project of NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
This project has taken 25 years to complete, has been delayed many times, was almost cancelled, and ended up way over budget. The original launch date was 2007 and the original estimated cost was $500 million. It ended up costing about $9.7 billion. Many people who have been following this project wondered at times whether this day would ever come.
I've watched several spacecraft launches before but I think this is the first one that had a destination beyond low Earth orbit. The telescope is headed toward earth's 2nd LaGrange point (L2), which is a point where an object can remain stationary w respect to the Earth w/o actually orbiting the Earth. It is about 930,000 miles away and it will take almost a month to get in its final position. The telescope actually wont be completely stationary w respect to Earth but will appear to rotate in a small orbit. There will be about 5 months of calibrations before the telescope actually will start producing results.
I found it interesting that after the stage 1 rocket ended it actually decreased in altitude from about 140 miles to about 110 miles before it started climbing again. The stage 2 rocket ended about 25 minutes after launch and the telescope separated from the rocket about 2 minutes later. At about 29 minutes after launch, the telescope started unfolding, which I thought wouldnt happen until it got to the LaGrange point. There are 344 moves that will occur during the unfolding, so a lot of chance for something to go wrong. Unlike the Hubble telescope, which it basically is replacing, it will be too difficult to send astronauts to fix any problems that occur so hopefully everything will work as planned.
This project has taken 25 years to complete, has been delayed many times, was almost cancelled, and ended up way over budget. The original launch date was 2007 and the original estimated cost was $500 million. It ended up costing about $9.7 billion. Many people who have been following this project wondered at times whether this day would ever come.
I've watched several spacecraft launches before but I think this is the first one that had a destination beyond low Earth orbit. The telescope is headed toward earth's 2nd LaGrange point (L2), which is a point where an object can remain stationary w respect to the Earth w/o actually orbiting the Earth. It is about 930,000 miles away and it will take almost a month to get in its final position. The telescope actually wont be completely stationary w respect to Earth but will appear to rotate in a small orbit. There will be about 5 months of calibrations before the telescope actually will start producing results.
I found it interesting that after the stage 1 rocket ended it actually decreased in altitude from about 140 miles to about 110 miles before it started climbing again. The stage 2 rocket ended about 25 minutes after launch and the telescope separated from the rocket about 2 minutes later. At about 29 minutes after launch, the telescope started unfolding, which I thought wouldnt happen until it got to the LaGrange point. There are 344 moves that will occur during the unfolding, so a lot of chance for something to go wrong. Unlike the Hubble telescope, which it basically is replacing, it will be too difficult to send astronauts to fix any problems that occur so hopefully everything will work as planned.
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