Reported by|christianmegan
science section editor-CJ
FEBRUARY 9, 2023

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     NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launched a year ago from Kourou, French Guiana, beginning its historic mission to help humanity better understand the universe. And now, roughly six months after the world looked on in awe at the first stunning images of faraway galaxies and celestial formations, Webb’s groundbreaking engineering and technology design continues to astound the senses, boggle the mind and push the boundaries of scientific possibility.

Webb is an infrared telescope designed to study every phase of cosmic history and view objects once thought too old, distant, or faint. The ultraviolet and visible light emitted by the very first luminous objects that formed in the universe has been stretched so that it reaches us today, more than 13.5 billion years later, as infrared light, visible to Webb’s unique instruments.

With this ability to look farther into the interstellar past, Webb can see to a time when the earliest stars and galaxies were born. This feat of human ingenuity is set to change our understanding of cosmic connections and give insight into long-considered existential questions such as: “How did we get here?” and “Are we alone?”

Led by Northrop Grumman, the global aerospace and defense technology company, engineers from across the industry addressed and developed solutions to these mind-bending ideas. Engineers needed to create an observatory able to unfold in space with a deployable telescope more than six times larger than Hubble; send it more than a million miles away from Earth; and operate it at extreme cryogenic temperatures. And, they had to invent new technologies nearly every step of the way — many integral to the launch vehicle, image processing, electromechanical systems, thermal systems, and complex sun-shield.