NASA did what it had to do.Īnd we as humans, temporary inhabitants of a dust mote, as Carl Sagan said, did what we had to do. A Cosmic Horn of Plenty: “I haven’t been so entranced with a view of the heavens for a long time,” writes our cosmic affairs correspondent, stunned by the power of the telescope.Īt the risk of jinxing the whole thing, not to mention my journalistic objectivity, I have to say I’m glad it didn’t happen that way.A Very Different Lens: The woman who oversaw the creation of the camera used by the telescope discussed the excitement of seeing her team’s work come to fruition.Closer to Home: The telescope can capture photographs not only of galaxies across the universe, but also of objects in our celestial backyard, including planets such as Neptune.Here are five things we learned from that spectacular slide show. First Images: In July, NASA released the first set of images captured by the telescope. Read More About the James Webb Space Telescope After traveling nearly one million miles to reach a location beyond the moon, the James Webb Space Telescope will spend years observing the cosmos. We knew that at any moment a call or a tweet saying something on the telescope had snagged or ripped or frozen, gone offline or just started sending gibberish would plunge us into a heartbroken crisis investigation: Interviewing disappointed and baffled astrophysicists, begging engineers for better explanations about tiny bits of metal or computer algorithms we’d never heard of, covering rounds of commissions, tiger team reports, congressional hearings and outside critics. The astronomers were on the edge of their seats.Īnd so were I and my colleagues. There were 344 things that could have gone wrong during that month - what NASA calls “single point failures” - that would have doomed the mission. As it journeyed toward its destination, it had to unfold like a robot from the “Transformers” movies and shape-shift into, well, a telescope with a golden 21-foot-wide mirror gliding atop a silver sunshield. The telescope was launched from French Guiana as a tightly wrapped package of wires, plastic and slabs of gold-plated beryllium. It traveled about a million miles since launching on Dec. On Monday, NASA announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had reached the perch from which it could spend as much as 20 years in surveillance of the cosmos. Follow our live coverage of NASA’s new James Webb Telescope images here.
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