NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary $9 billion instrument able to peer more deeply into the cosmos than ever, was due for launch early Saturday from South America's northeastern coast, opening a highly anticipated new era of astronomical exploration.
The powerful infrared telescope, hailed by NASA as the premiere space-science observatory of the next decade, was packed inside the cargo bay of an Ariane 5 rocket poised for blastoff at 7:20 a.m. EST from the European Space Agency's launch base in French Guiana.
By comparison, Webb's 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits Earth itself from 340 miles away, passing in and out of the planet's shadow every 90 minutes. Webb mainly will view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to peer through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born, while Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.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 or any other telescope.
Hubble's view reached back to roughly 400 million years following the Big Bang, revealing objects that Webb will be able to re-examine with far greater clarity.
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