Just over a year ago, astronomers released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). About seven months earlier, on December 25, 2021, JWST lifted off from the Arianespace spaceport tucked away in the jungles of French Guiana. Thousands watched in person, but many tens of thousands, including me, watched the livestream from their homes. We held our collective breaths as the solid rocket boosters of the Ariane 5 hoisted the $10 billion spacecraft into the atmosphere on twin pillars of flame. When the space telescope was finally injected into its transfer orbit with much greater precision than was expected, space nerds rejoiced with exceeding joy that another space telescope had safely come into the world. It was a great Christmas Day present.

The JWST had a long journey from the drafting board of some visionary engineer or astronomer to launch. The first ideas for a successor to the now hallowed Hubble Space Telescope were begun even before Hubble was launched in 1990. However, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the contract for constructing the telescope was awarded and design work began in earnest. In 2007-2008 the telescope was redesigned and the needed budget for the telescope was raised from the initial estimate of around $1 billion to $5 billion. Over the next ten years the cost continued to creep up and the planned launch date kept moving to the right.

After main phase of construction was completed in 2016, the spacecraft entered extensive testing over the next five years to ensure that it would deploy and operate correctly once it was launched. Aerospace engineers and astronomers had reason to be worried. Only a few months after Hubble had launched, it was obvious that Hubble’s mirror was flawed. The discrepancy was only one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, but it was enough to make Hubble’s images blurry and not much better than astronomers could get from ground-based telescopes. It was about three years before one of the Space Shuttles were able to carry corrective lenses into orbit that astronauts could install between the mirror and the detector. JWST wouldn’t have such a repair option since its orbit would be over 2000 times farther from Earth than Hubble.

In September of 2021, the JWST left the Northrup Grumman facility in Redondo Beach California and traveled under secrecy¹ through the Panama Canal to its launch site near the equator at Kourou French Guiana. It was integrated onto its Ariane 5 launch vehicle and then carefully encased in a fairing to protect it from the aerodynamic forces and noise during launch. After a few delays, it was launched on December 25 to much fanfare and few complications. Once it separated from the Ariane 5 second stage, JWST had a month-long journey to its destination orbit at Earth’s L2 Lagrange point. The L2 point is a point in space out beyond the orbit of the Moon where the gravitational pull from the Earth and Sun act together to allow objects to hover around a point in space about one million miles from Earth. However, the L2 orbit is not stable. It requires regular puffs of propellant from a spacecraft’s thrusters to keep it balanced perfectly. This means the life of a spacecraft at L2 is limited to the amount of fuel it has onboard. Since the launch went perfectly, engineers estimated that JWST’s lifespan had been nearly doubled from ten to twenty years.

As JWST traveled to its orbit at L2, it began deploying its various parts. Due to needing to fit inside the 4.5-meter (14.75 feet) wide Ariane 5 fairing, its 6.5 meter (21 foot) mirror had to be folded during the launch. It was for this reason that JWST’s mirror was not made of a single piece like Hubble’s, but was instead composed of eighteen hexagonal segments of beryllium metal coated in gold. But before the outside sections of the mirror and the telescope’s secondary mirror could be folded out and locked in place, the tennis-court sized sunshield had to be unfolded and tensioned.

The unfolding of the sunshield was one of the most nerve-wracking parts of the deployment process. The sunshield is made of five layers of specialized polymer called Kapton that has a reflective coating applied to it. Each layer had to be carefully unfolded, then tensioned so the layers wouldn’t touch and conduct heat between the layers. The sunshield was a vital part of the mission because of the type of light JWST was designed to detect. If the sunshield didn’t properly deploy, JWST would be a $10 billion piece of space junk.

JWST is often called the successor to Hubble, but there is one main way in which it is different from Hubble, it is designed to detect infrared light, not visible light. Infrared light is longer in wavelength than visible light, which means it can travel through gas and dust clouds in the Milky Way that obscured Hubble’s vision. This ability allows JWST to peer inside of nebulae that Hubble could only see the outside of. Not only would JWST have “x-ray vision”, but it could also see more distant galaxies than Hubble. Due to the expansion of the universe, the light from distant galaxies is stretched until it reaches the infrared part of the spectrum. This means that visible light telescopes such as Hubble are simply not able to see some of the galaxies and stars that JWST could see.

We experience infrared light in our everyday lives as heat. We feel it on our skin when we warm ourselves beside a wood stove or by a campfire. It is for this reason that an infrared telescope must be kept extremely cold. If the telescope is warm, the infrared light it gives off will overwhelm the much fainter infrared light from distant stars and galaxies. Because space is a vacuum, spacecraft must deal with extremes of temperature. The sunlit side of a spacecraft will be above the boiling point of water, while the dark side will be hundreds of degrees cooler. The sunshield was designed to keep most of the telescope in a perpetual night so the delicate infrared detectors would only see distant stars and galaxies, not be blinded by the heat given off by the telescope, the nearby Earth, or the sun.

Once the sunshield was fully deployed, the temperature on the side of the sunshield facing away from the sun dropped to -370 °F (-223 °C). This is cold, but still isn’t cold enough for some of the telescope’s instruments. Some instruments were further cooled by liquid helium to -447 °F (-266 °C), only a few degrees above absolute zero.

Even after all of its different components were unfolded and deployed, JWST’s journey was not finished. Because of the sensitivity of its instruments, the telescope must keep itself pointed so the sunshield is always between itself and the sun. The issue is that the thrusters are only on the back of the telescope. This meant that JWST could only speed up, not slow down. The telescope was launched a bit slower than was needed to enter its orbit, then it would use its thrusters to speed up just enough so that it would slide into its orbit at the L2 point. This is like losing the brakes on your car and then timing your deceleration so your car stops rolling right when your front tires land on the white line at a traffic light. With a lot of math and several careful burns of its thrusters to adjust its orbit, JWST entered its destination orbit about a month after it was launched.

After a lengthy calibrated and adjustment period, JWST began taking pictures with its different instruments. What it sent back to astronomers on Earth was even better than they had hoped. The first pictures were released by NASA on July 12, 2022. It was such a big deal that the day before they were released, President Joe Biden held a press conference to release the first photo, a deep-field image of a galaxy cluster with the memorable moniker of SMACS 0723. The choice was made to take an image of this galaxy cluster because it was one that Hubble had also taken an image of many years earlier.

To take this image, JWST looked at a piece of the night sky about the size of a grain of sand held at arm length for 12.5 hours. In the foreground of the image are a few stars indicated by the six-sided diffraction spikes caused by the hexagonal shape of the mirror segments. The rest of the image is covered by a profusion of galaxies of different shapes and colors. Some of them are stretched into impossible shapes by the gravitational lensing from the galaxy cluster that is between the background galaxies and the telescope. It doesn’t take an expert to see the difference between Hubble’s image and JWST’s image.

Another image released was of a section of the Carina Nebula called the “Cosmic Cliffs.” The difference between Hubble’s and JWST’s image clearly showed the ability of JWST to look inside of dust clouds.

Since last July, astronomers have released many more images taken by James Webb. Iconic pictures from Hubble like the “Pillars of Creation” start seeming fuzzy and dingy when compared to what Webb can do. The immense amount of time, money, and effort poured into this spacecraft is finally being rewarded. The images and other data that Hubble has given astronomers since 1990 has revolutionized many areas of astronomy, it is likely that JWST will do the same.

Was JWST worth $10 billion? That is an astronomical sum of money (no pun intended). Are there better ways to spend our tax dollars? Certainly, there are needs on Earth that you could argue are much greater—hunger, violence, and poverty, to name just a few. With a growing world population, perhaps we should instead be pouring money into research to learn how to sustainably feed 10 billion people by the 2050s as well as produce the clean power they will need. All these are necessary goals, but there is something about the James Webb Space Telescope and similar projects that seem to tap into something where the benefits are perhaps not quite as apparent, but are still valuable.

After each day of Creation, God saw that what He had created was good. When we investigate the universe He created, we can clearly see the Designer’s fingerprints (Rom 1:20). The unbelievable power and scale of the universe speaks of His power and majesty.

The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament shows His handiwork.
Day unto day utters speech,
And night unto night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language
Where their voice is not heard.
Their line has gone out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
In them He has set a tabernacle for the sun,
Which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
And rejoices like a strong man to run its race.
Its rising is from one end of heaven,
And its circuit to the other end;
And there is nothing hidden from its heat.

Psalm 19:1-6 NKJV

The images that Hubble and JWST have taken bring everyone, secular and religious alike, to an awe of the universe. To some, this brings them to acknowledge and worship the Creator. Maybe there is a better way to spend $10 billion, but when the ingenuity of man is put to the task of revealing the beauty of the universe that God has created, I think it was worth it.

A generous person on the Internet put together a website called Webb Compare that compares images from JWST and Hubble. If you enjoyed looking at the pictures in this post so far, you should check it out.

1. The reason for this was because people were worried that pirates might capture the telescope and hold it for hostage. ↩︎