Décollage réussi samedi pour le télescope spatial James Webb (JWST), attendu depuis trente ans par les astronomes du monde entier pour examinationr l’Univers avec des moyens inégalés, qui va pouvoir rejoindre son million poste de 1,servation in Earth.
JWST, the most powerful space telescope ever, blasted off an Ariane 5 rocket from the Guyana Space Center at 12:20 GMT, before separating 27 minutes later, as scheduled.
“Web well-separated telescope, Go Webb,” launch director Jean-Luc Foer announced from the Kourou Control Center urn, to thunderous applause.
“An important step has been taken,” NASA, which built the JWST in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency (ACS), wrote on Twitter. Arianespace Group, for its part, hailed the “best Christmas gift ever” with this launch.
Immediately after take-off, the telescope flew over the Atlantic Ocean, then Africa, until the final separation, which occurred at an altitude of 1,400 km and a speed of more than 34,000 km / h. An onboard camera upstairs from Ariane showed this class and especially the solar panel deployment by James Webb.
The telescope will take about a month to reach its final location. With the ambition to shed more light on humanity in two questions that torment them: “Where did we come from?” and “Are we alone in the universe?”.
Thus we see the glimmer of the “cosmic dawn”, when the first galaxies began to illuminate the universe since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
– In Hubble’s footsteps –