"We are going to discover incredible things we never imagined."
"It's a time machine, it's going to take us back to the very beginnings of the universe, " he said. He congratulated the thousands of men and women who built and launched the telescope, saying "you all have just been incredible and over three decades, you produced this telescope that's now going to take us back in time." "This is a great day, not only for America, for our European and Canadian partners, but it's a great day for planet Earth," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, speaking from the Kennedy Space Center. With a flawless launch behind them, engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore will now focus on deploying the telescope's sunshade and segmented primary mirror over the next two weeks.Ī few minutes later, NASA reported Webb was powered up, communicating with flight controllers and was correctly oriented with respect to the sun with all six of its stabilizing gyro-like reaction wheels working normally. A camera on the Ariane 5 upper stage captures a view of the James Webb Space Telescope slowly drifting away moments after release. Still folded up to fit inside the Ariane 5's nose cone, the observatory's single solar panel, critical to begin recharging the spacecraft's batteries, deployed on computer command moments after separation, clearly visible in video downlinked from a camera on the rocket's upper stage. "Go, Webb!" a mission controller exclaimed as the team burst into applause. Then, 27 minutes after launch, at an altitude of about 865 miles above the eastern coast of Africa, the James Webb Space Telescope was released to fly on its own, outward bound at more than 21,000 mph. The first stage's single hydrogen-fueled Vulcain 2 engine shut down 8-and-a-half minutes after launch and the flight continued for another 16 minutes on the power of the rocket's cryogenic second stage.
A European Ariane 5 rocket thunders away from French Guiana carrying NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope on a historic flight to look back in time toward the Big Bang birth of the cosmos. The workhorse European booster, built by Arianespace as part of ESA's contribution to the Webb project, put on a spectacular holiday show, racing away from its jungle launch site on the northeast coast of South America through a cloudy sky.Īccelerating through the sound barrier 47 seconds after liftoff, the Ariane 5 quickly climbed out of the thick lower atmosphere, shedding its two strap-on solid-fuel boosters along the way. In a mission more than two decades in the making, NASA launched the most expensive science probe ever built Saturday, a $10 billion telescope that will attempt to capture starlight from the first galaxies to be born in the fiery crucible of the Big Bang.īillions over budget and years behind schedule, the James Webb Space Telescope finally got off the ground Christmas Day, rocketing up from the European Space Agency's launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, at 7:20 a.m.
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