NASA's next big space telescope set for blastoff from French Guiana
(Reuters) - The James Webb Space Telescope, a NASA instrument designed to allow humankind's first glimpse of the infant universe as it existed when the earliest galaxies are believed to have formed, was set for launch today from the northeastern coast of South America.
The revolutionary $9 billion infrared telescope, hailed by NASA as the premiere space-science observatory of the next decade, was bundled inside the cargo bay of an Ariane 5 rocket poised for blastoff at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT) from the European Space Agency's (ESA) launch base in French Guiana.
If all goes as planned, the 14,000pound instrument, which will unfurl to nearly the size of a tennis court, will be released from the Frenchbuilt rocket after a 26-minute ride into space.
Over the following month, the Webb telescope will coast to its destination in solar orbit roughly 1 million miles from Earth - about four times farther away than the moon. Webb's special orbital path will keep it in constant alignment with Earth as the planet and telescope circle the sun in tandem.
By comparison, Webb's 30-yearold predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits Earth itself from 340 miles away, passing in and out of the planet's shadow every 90 minutes.
Named for NASA's chief during most of the agency's formative decade of the 1960s, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than Hubble and is expected to profoundly transform scientists' understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Webb mainly will view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to peer through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born, while Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The new telescope's primary mirror - consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal - also has a much bigger lightcollecting area, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back into time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
That, astronomers say, will bring into view a glimpse of the cosmos never previously seen - dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.