Liftoff of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, designed to peer farther than ever into the universe, has been delayed until Christmas Day at the earliest, due to poor weather at the launch site on South America's northeastern coast, the space agency said on Tuesday.
The 24-hour weather delay at the Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana follows a two-day postponement from an earlier Dec. 22 targeted launch window caused by electronic communications difficulties between the launch vehicle and its payload, according to NASA.Encapsulation of the powerful infrared telescope inside the cargo bay of an Ariane 5 rocket was completed on Dec. 17. The rocket is now poised for blastoff between 7:20 a.m. and 7:52 a.m. EST on Saturday.
By comparison, Webb's 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits the Earth itself from 340 miles away.The Sunshield test unit to be used on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is stacked and expanded at a cleanroom in the Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach, California, in this NASA handout picture released July 25, 2014.
The new telescope's primary mirror - consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal - also has a much bigger light-collecting area, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back into time, than Hubble.
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