The James Webb Telescope will stay in orbit for more than 10 years thanks to a fuel-efficient launch on Christmas Day, according to NASA. The telescope was transported with Arianespace Ariane 5. Despite two short mid-course fixes, its launch used less propellant than originally expected.
This will allow science operations in orbit, significantly more than the 10-year science lifetime of the $10 billion observatory, the US space agency said on Wednesday. The first mid-road correction was a small 65-minute post-launch refueling, which boosted the telescope’s speed to 45 miles per hour. It added a smaller addition, 6.3 miles, on Dec.
James Webb telescope on a million-mile journey
The additional boost allowed JWST’s solar array to power up a half-and-a-half and 29 minutes after launch from Ariane 5. The sequence was coded to automatically deploy once the observatory reached a certain altitude, or 33 minutes after launch, whichever comes first.
Additional fuel is used for what NASA refers to as station hold maneuvers. These are known as small impulsive bursts to adjust Webb’s trajectory as it reaches its target on the far side of Earth, in an area known as the second Lagrance point, or L2. This is a million-mile journey and is expected to take about six months.
Once the telescope gets there, it begins sending back unfiltered images of the galaxy’s most distant and oldest access points, some 13.7 billion light-years away. This was recorded as a quantum leap forward from the Hubble telescope launched in 1990 with the space shuttle Discovery.
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