🛰️ Mission
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
- Launched
- 25 December 2021, 4 years ago
- Working for
- 4 years so far
- Built by
- NASA, ESA and CSA
- Sees
- Infrared light
- Where it is
- A million and a half kilometres from Earth, on the night side
- Best known for
- The sharpest infrared pictures ever taken, reaching galaxies that formed soon after the universe began
Did you know?
- Its mirror is 6.5 metres across, too wide for any rocket, so it launched folded and opened itself over two weeks.
- A sunshield the size of a tennis court keeps it at about −233 °C. It has to be that cold to see infrared light at all.
What it showed us
Carina Nebula
A huge glowing cloud home to some of the biggest stars known.
Southern Ring Nebula
A dying star’s shells of gas, among the first photos from the James Webb Space Telescope.
More NASA photos of James Webb Space TelescopeStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.
GALEX
Ten years of the ultraviolet sky.