From the European Curp Space, located in South America, started a heavy Ariane 5 rocket with the James Webb Space Observatory, reports in twitter Arianespace company.
By the end of February, the telescope should take the second point of the Lagrange Sun system – the land located at a distance of about 1.6 million kilometers from the planet. The beginning of the observatory is scheduled for May.
In the future, James Webb should replace the Hubble orbital telescope, launched US in April 1990. The diameter of the collecting surface of the main second mirror is 2.4 meters, whereas the first one parameter reaches 6.5 meters. This makes it possible to carry out observations not only in optical, but also in the near and medium infrared bands.
“James Webb Space Telescope will be the world’s main observatory in the sciences of space after its launch in 2021. Webb will solve the secrets of our solar system, look into distant worlds around other stars, explore mysterious structures and origin of our universe,” – Specifies on the NASA website.
In November, Deputy Director of the Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences Larisa Likhacheva, at a meeting of the Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on Space, stated that the Russian Space Telescope “Millimetron”, which is scheduled to be launched in the early 2030s, will be a hundred times cheaper than the American orbital laboratory James Webb.
James WebB Head Developer is the American Northrop Grumman Corporation. The cost of the Space Observatory is about ten billion dollars. The main tasks of James WebB are the study of the early universe, galaxies and supermarital black holes, as well as a detailed study of exoplanet.
Hubble orbits are allowed at the end of the 2030s.