24, 2022, the world’s biggest and most powerful space telescope reached its final destination 1 million miles away, one month after launching on a quest to behold the dawn of the universe.
The telescope will enable astronomers to peer back further in time than ever before, all the way back to when the first stars and galaxies were forming 13.7 billion years ago.
A sunshield as big as a tennis court stretched open on the telescope in early January, 1 1/2 weeks after the Christmas Day launch from French Guiana.
Monday’s engine firing put Webb into orbit around the sun at the so-called second Lagrange point, where the gravitational forces of the sun and Earth balance.
Considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits 330 miles up, Webb is too far away for emergency repairs.
Spacewalking astronauts performed surgery five times on Hubble.