James Webb space telescope successfully lifts off

Washington, Dec 25: James Webb Space Telescope took off on Saturday from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. James Webb is the largest and most powerful space telescope ever that is constructed to help researchers understand the origins of the universe and begin to answer key questions about our existence. “We have LIFTOFF of the @NASAWebb Space Telescope! At 7:20 am ET (12:20 UTC), the beginning of a new, exciting decade of science climbed to the sky Webb's mission to #Unfold The Universe will change our understanding of space as we know it,” NASA tweeted. The USD 10 billion project spanning over three decades, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, hopes to look further back in time than ever before to find out more about the creation of the first stars and the beginnings of the Universe. As per the reports of News Agency ANI, the truck-sized telescope will answer questions about the solar system, study exoplanets in new ways and look deeper into the universe than we've ever been able to. The telescope will travel for about a month until it reaches an orbit about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometres) away from Earth. The telescope comes equipped with a segmented mirror that can extend 21 feet and 4 inches (6.5 meters) - a massive length that will allow the mirror to collect more light from the objects it observes once the telescope is deployed in space. The concept for the telescope was first imagined as a successor to Hubble at a workshop in 1989, and construction on Webb first began in 2004. Since then, thousands of scientists, technicians and engineers from 14 countries have spent 40 million hours building the telescope.