The James Webb Space Telescope will be launched from French Guiana.
After almost two decades, NASA has successfully completed building its largest space telescope, which is 100 times powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be launched from French Guiana by Ariane 5 rocket in October 2018, Xinhua news agency reports.
“Today, we’re celebrating the fact that our telescope is finished and we’re about to prove that it works,” Nobel laureate and Webb’s senior project scientist John Mather said during a news conference posted on YouTube.
“We will see things we have not seen before because this telescope is much more powerful than even the great Hubble telescope, to give you some perspective about what we can do with it. If you were a bumblebee at a distance of the moon, we will be able to see you, both your reflective sunlight and by thermal radiation and heat you emitted,” he said.
The new telescope will open up “a whole new territory of astronomy”, Mather added.
The Webb telescope will be the successor of NASA’s 26-year-old Hubble and it will provide images of the first galaxies ever formed.
The telescope has a five-layer sunshield of the size of a tennis court to protect its sensitive infrared cameras from the rays of the Sun. The layers work together to reduce temperatures between the hot and cold sides of the observatory by about 298 degree Celsius.
NASA’s engineers and technicians also successfully completed the first important optical measurement of Webb’s fully assembled primary mirror, called a Center of Curvature test, to measure the mirrors shape.
“This is the only test of the entire mirror where we can use the same equipment during a before and after test,” NASA’s Deputy telescope manager for Webb Ritva Keski- Kuha said.
“This test will show if there are any changes or damages to the optical system,” Keski- Kuha said.
The project, which costs $8.7 billion, is a joint venture by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
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