Just an hour or so ago one if the coolest technological feats of my life took another huge step towards success. The James Webb telescope is now in orbit at Lagrange point 2, which is a relatively gravity neutral section of space on the far side of Earth relative to the sun.
There are still plenty of milestones left to achieve before Webb is sending images back to Earth, but just making it to this point is a marvel. The way it was designed, largely due to rocket payload requirements, required an elaborate unfolding over the course of weeks after it was launched on Christmas Day. Each step of deployment had numerous points of failure but everything has gone well (so far, fingers crossed).
I, for one, am geeked to follow the progress as the team brings system online and gets them calibrated. Sadly the first images are not expected until around June due to the time it’ll take to cool some systems to around 7 Kelvin (~ -447 F) and properly calibrate them.
If you’re a nerd too here are a couple of links. The first is to the Webb Telescope tracker at nasa that shows it’s current telemetry and activities. The second is to a YouTube vid giving a brief overview of the design of Webb itself.
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html
