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Designed as a replacement for the Hubble space telescope, the James Webb telescope, which was launched on Christmas day last year, ran into trouble almost from the start. In the course of daily life, it is hard to remember that the act of seeing is an act of time travel. When the light emanating from or reflecting off an object — a pen on the desk, a bus coming down the street, a star in the sky — hits the eye’s retina, it is a light that has already aged, whether by a fraction of a second or a few billion years. The James Webb Space Telescope, having taken its position 1.5 million km from the earth, is a reminder of this miracle of physics. It has been sent up into space so that the human eye can see what the universe looked like shortly after it came into existence.
Designed as a replacement for the Hubble space telescope, the James Webb telescope, which was launched on Christmas day last year, ran into trouble almost from the start. In the first place, the ambitious observatory, which was planned and funded by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, took a decade to make. At $10 billion, it also turned out to be far more expensive than the initial estimate of $1 billion. This was partly due to management failures, but also because the technical challenges were huge. Unlike the Hubble, the James Webb is an infrared telescope, making it far more complex. This included the creation of a tennis court-sized sunshield and a gigantic primary mirror that had to be folded for the launch and then unfolded in space.
Which is why its flawless deployment has been a relief — and a triumph. The telescope, which moved into its final position this week, has already begun its work of looking for answers to some of humanity’s most pressing questions, including about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. How thrilling it would be to finally know.
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