Thousands of people worked hard to get Webb where it is today.
, fully deployed into its magnificent final form. Like a butterfly leaving behind its Earth-bound caterpillar shape, a new, larger and more beautiful observatory transformed over the course of a weeks-long journey in space. Now, from its new vantage point nearly 1 million miles away, it will scan the skies for years to come, offering us a never-before-seen view of the universe.
The complexity of this transformation cannot be overstated. A tennis-court-sized, five-layer sunshield unfurled with incredible precision. The secondary mirror then extended out on a 24-foot-long tripod. And on Jan. 8, the team finished unfolding the— composed of 18 gold-colored, honey-comb-like hexagons spanning 21.3 feet across altogether.
To the untrained eye, breakthrough innovation and exploration looks awfully close to crazy and impossible. The original goal was to look back in time over 13.5 billion years to observe the first galaxies and stars in. And while we had many supporters, we also had many people, right from the beginning, who thought it couldn’t be done. Simply having the courage to set that lofty, outrageous goal some 25 years ago — that, right there, was the first show of daring from this mission.
A team then had to take that vision and turn it into reality: the biggest, most powerful, most complex space science observatory the world has ever seen. To do that, we needed inventors and implementors. We needed visionaries and leaders who focus on realism of technology, schedule and cost. We needed both decades-long experience and youthful, unfettered enthusiasm.
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