“We’re essentially looking at the universe in heat vision,” says astrophysicist Erin Smith of Goddard Space Flight Center and a project scientist on Webb. But humans do experience infrared radiation as heat. Webb sees in infrared light, wavelengths longer than what the human eye can see. It’s just a degree of how thrilled,” he said. “Everybody’s going to be really thrilled by it. The team will put an exact number on that lifetime over the next few months. It’s going to extensively exceed our 10 years,” said Parrish in the Jan. “We’re very, very happy with our estimated lifetime. As a result, it might be able to last more than 10 years, team members say, longer than the original five- to 10-year estimate. Luckily, the spacecraft had a near-perfect launch and didn’t use much fuel in transit to L2. Once the telescope runs out of fuel, the mission is over. The amount of fuel needed to maintain Webb’s home in space will set the lifetime of the mission. We fire our thrusters to correct our position, thus maintaining our halo orbit.” “For JWST, we will execute what we call station keeping maneuvers every 21 days. “JWST and other astronomical satellites, which are said to be at L2 but are really in halo orbits, need propulsion to maintain their positions,” Friedman says. Circling L2 in 180 days as L2 circles the sun in a “halo orbit” is much more stable - it’s harder to fall off the basketball when in constant motion. If you nudged an object sitting exactly at that point, it would be easy to make it wander off. It’s like trying to stay balanced directly on top of a basketball. That’s because L2 is not precisely stable, Friedman says. It’s orbiting L2, even as L2 orbits the sun. The telescope, also known as JWST, isn’t just sitting tight, though. Pairs of massive objects in space have five such Lagrange points. That lets objects at Lagrange points stay put without much effort. L2, technically known as the second Earth-sun Lagrange point, is a spot about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in the direction of Mars, where the sun’s and Earth’s gravity combine to provide the inward-pulling centripetal force needed to keep a smaller object on a curved path. “Everything could go perfectly, and it would still take six months” from launch for the telescope’s science instruments to be ready for action, he says. “That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong,” says astronomer Scott Friedman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who is managing this next phase of Webb’s journey. There are still several months’ worth of tasks on Webb’s to-do list before the telescope is ready to peep at the earliest light in the universe or spy on exoplanets’ alien atmospheres ( SN: 10/6/21). “Everything we’re doing is about getting the observatory ready to do transformative science. “We’re a month in and the baby hasn’t even opened its eyes yet,” said Jane Rigby of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The telescope can’t start doing science yet.

We were just getting this beautiful spacecraft unfolded and ready to do science. “The last 30 days, we call that ’30 days on the edge.’ We’re just so proud to be through that.” But the team’s work is not yet done. Guiding the telescope to L2 is “an incredible accomplishment by the entire team,” said Webb’s commissioning manager Keith Parrish in a January 24 news conference announcing the arrival. After a Christmas launch and a month of unfolding and assembling itself in space, the new space observatory reached its final destination, a spot known as L2. The James Webb Space Telescope has finally arrived at its new home.

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