NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has reached its destination. Now what? - TechRadar

After 20 years in development, $10 billion spent, and 14 nail-biting days of exquisite hi-tech origami in space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was fully deployed?

All telescopes are time machines...Every photon Webb will detect is old light, but since it’s an infrared telescope it will detect the very oldest, most ancient light.

Each segment is covered in gold, which is perfect for reflecting infrared light.

Unlike Hubble, which looks at the universe in visible and ultraviolet light, Webb captures ancient, stretched infrared light.

Every photon Webb will detect is old light, but since it’s an infrared telescope it will detect the very oldest, most ancient light.

Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths longer than visible light, so it is imperceptible to the human eye. .

So red in fact that it falls off the visible light spectrum entirely and into the infrared spectrum.

The Webb telescope is currently here.

Although it’s too small and dim to see with the naked eye, look out at night and Webb will be out there.

Webb is unlike most space telescopes – Hubble included – that look out at space while orbiting Earth.

So while Hubble was famously fixed by Space Shuttle astronauts in 1993 after launching a few years prior with an optical abnormality, Webb is too far away to fix if something goes wrong. .

“This telescope is not ready out of the box and the first images are going to be ugly – it’s going to be blurry,” said Jane Rigby, Webb Operations Project Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, at a press briefing in January

Once that process is over – by mid-March or thereabouts – engineers will take about two months to point Webb at some bright stars to properly collimate and focus the telescope

She wouldn’t be drawn on exactly what the "wow" images would be of, but expect to see Webb’s deep infrared overlays on classic Hubble images such as the Horsehead Nebula and the Pillars of Creation