


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.
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In the first year, about 7% of scientific observations will be devoted to the Solar System.Įarlier, an asteroid the size of two Kyiv TV towers flew past the Earth.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. James Webb is expected to be commissioned in June. Other planned scientific goals in the Solar System include Saturn’s rings, the atmosphere of its moon Titan, observations of several icy objects in the Kuiper Belt and sporadic plumes emanating from the icy moon Europa. Observing the asteroid will help science to better consider the planets Uranus and Neptune, which were captured by only one NASA Voyager-2 spacecraft. Because to track asteroids, the telescope needs to switch between a colder and a hotter position, which can affect the fine alignment of mirrors and instruments. Plans for the first year of observations by James WebbĪccording to NASA, James Webb faces several additional challenges when tracking moving targets. So a list of 40 names was compiled, among which we stopped at Tenzing 6841. The team specifically chose the asteroid in such a way that its name was associated with success, which was not achieved easily. Coincidentally, the observations of James Webb were carried out just a few days before the 69th anniversary of the conquest of the peak on May 29, 1953. This is an object from the main belt, named after Tenzing Norgay, a Tibetan mountaineer and one of the first two famous people who conquered Mount Everest together with Edmund Hillary. The asteroid chosen for observation was Tenzing 6841. Successful tracking of a nearby object shows that JWST can monitor both objects of the Solar System, and distant galaxies, stars and other distant objects that it will observe during its at least 20-year service life. NASA’s James Webb Space Observatory (JWST) of the new generation observed a moving asteroid for the first time on the eve of the start of the commissioning period.
