Webb will take about 30 days to reach its destination.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, GUYANA — Telescope Outer Space James Webb launched on Christmas Saturday (25/12) from Guyana, France. This telescope has several advantages over Hubble telescope which has been operating since the 1990s.
The US$10 billion Webb Telescope is much bigger, more complex, and more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope, which has studied the sky from Earth’s orbit for more than three decades.
The new observatory will also move further—as far as the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2) about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth toward Mars (not toward the sun). Lagrange points are gravitationally stable points where a spacecraft can more or less “park”, maintaining the same relative position without consuming a lot of fuel.
Webb was optimized to view the universe in Infrared (IR) light, the long wavelengths that we perceive as heat. Hubble, by contrast, sees mainly in the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths.
In order to capture the faintest IR signals, Webb’s scientific instruments had to be kept very cool. So the observatory installed a five-layer sun visor that would be as big as a tennis court if fully opened.
A sun visor will not provide the necessary protection if it is facing away from the sun. And that’s where L2 comes in.
“What’s so special about this orbit is that it allows the telescope to stay aligned with Earth as it moves around the sun,” NASA officials wrote in the L2 explanation. Space, Friday (24/12).
“This allows the satellite’s massive sun visor to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the sun and Earth (and the moon). This is why the telescope will exit at the second Lagrange point,” they added.
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