James Webb Space Telescope Successful Launch — What You Should Know

NASA’s latest space telescope project, the James Webb Space Telescope, successfully launched on Christmas day this year. This telescope will act as a long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has provided humanity with stunning pictures of space, such as the famous Hubble Deep Field image shown below.

Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (University of Geneva) and M. Montes (University of New South Wales)

What is the James Webb Space Telescope?

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s newest space telescope project. The goal of this mission is to collect images in the visible and infrared ranges, with a major goal of learning more about the Big Bang. Most of the remnants from the Big Bang and the early history of the universe are highly redshifted due to how quickly the universe expanded immediately after the Big Bang. Therefore, in order to observe anything from this time, one would have to look into wavelengths longer than visible light, which is referred to as infrared wavelengths. Most of the JWST photos, then, will be in infrared. This means that most of the photos we will see will not appear how that area would appear to a human eye. JWST and other infrared telescopes allow us to see heat patterns and wavelengths we cannot otherwise see due to our limited eyesight capabilities.