The James Webb Space Telescope launched successfully early Saturday, rising skyward aboard an Ariane 5 rocket that lifted off at 7:20 a.m. Eastern Standard Time from a pad in Kourou, French Guiana, and beginning a 29-day journey to its orbital perch some 1 million miles from Earth, according to The Wall Street Journal.
For scientists worldwide, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s orbiting observatory—the largest, most powerful instrument of its type ever built—will herald a new era of discovery in space.
One hundred times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb will help astronomers peer at some of the oldest galaxies and stars in the universe, search for signs of habitability in the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system and study mysterious forces like dark energy using its infrared sensors.
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Oh, goody. I can’t wait to see. (more or less) How long is this going to take? Anyway, good show of the liftoff. Gee, I hate to think I’ll not see more…eventually. Oh, well. And, I just don’t know how long I’ll have sleepless nights wondering how old the Universe is, and when Life began. I’ll try to “hang in there.”