30 days after liftoff, the telescope – fully deployed – reached its operational orbit.įor the past four months, in comparison, almost all JWST work has focused on the less visible and far smaller processes of alignment and calibration. In perhaps the largest relief in the history of space-based observatories, the Webb Telescope’s immensely complex deployment process was then completed without a single major issue. Ariane 5 did most of the work, sending the telescope on a trajectory that – with some help from its onboard thrusters – would guide it to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point located some 1.5 million kilometers (~950,000 miles) from Earth. The combination of extreme mass reduction and extraordinary complexity required to launch such a large mirror so far from Earth with a rocket like Ariane 5 helps to partially explain why the Webb Telescope took so long (~18 years) and cost so much (~$9.7 billion) to design, develop, and build. Weighing 6.2 tons (~13,600 lb), JWST was almost half as heavy at liftoff as NASA’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope despite packing an unprecedented origami-like mirror with more than six times Hubble’s total collecting area. NASA says that the nascent James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) “optical performance…continues to be better than the…most optimistic predictions” after completing the alignment of its record-breaking mirror.īetween 7 and 14 years behind schedule and over budget by a factor of 2 to 10, an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket sent the Webb Telescope on its way to deep space on December 25th, 2021.
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