If you want to get your space fix without spending millions of dollars to be flung into the ether a la William Shatner, I have excellent news: It costs zero dollars to follow NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s trek to its final destination.
NASA launched the new $10 billion observatory into space on December 25, naming the tricky and difficult deployment process “29 days on the edge.” You can track it at the NASA website dedicated to this mission, with details about its location, speed, temperature, and more. As of Wednesday, the telescope is over 355,000 miles away from Earth — which is equivalent to driving the length of the United States more than 120 times. It’s traveled almost 40 percent of its journey to its final orbit. It has unfurled its solar array, and completed two mid-course correction maneuvers, according to Space.com.
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In a positive turn of events, the telescope actually used less propellant than the team originally thought it would need. That means that Webb should have extra propellant, which will allow the observatory to stay in orbit for more than ten years — doubling the five-year minimum for the mission.
Webb is on its way to its orbit, which is nearly 1 million miles away from Earth. The telescope will support operations for years, helping scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency to seek light from other galaxies, explore our own solar system, and check out exoplanets.
“The James Webb Space Telescope represents the ambition that NASA and our partners maintain to propel us forward into the future,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release. “The promise of Webb is not what we know we will discover; it’s what we don’t yet understand or can’t yet fathom about our universe. I can’t wait to see what it uncovers!”
