NASA's James Webb Space Telescope was released about 865 miles above the Earth after a 27-minute hypersonic ride. Coasting through space for two more weeks, the telescope will reach its destination in solar orbit 1 million miles from Earth
, described by NASA as the premiere space-science observatory of the next decade, was carried aloft inside the cargo bay of an Ariane 5 rocket that blasted off at about 7:20 a.m. EST from the European Space Agency's launch base in French Guiana.
Live video captured by a camera mounted on the rocket's upper stage showed the Webb gliding gently away after it was jettisoned, drawing cheers and applause from jubilant flight engineers in the mission control center. By comparison, Webb's 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits the Earth from 340 miles away, passing in and out of the planet's shadow every 90 minutes.
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. While Hubble caught glimmers of "toddler" galaxies, Webb will reveal those objects in greater detail while also capturing even fainter, earlier "infant" galaxies, astrophysicist Eric Smith, NASA's Webb program scientist, told Reuters hours before the launch.
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