Nearly a million miles from Earth, four times more distant from our planet than the moon, the James Webb Space Telescope is in position to begin exploring the universe's deepest mysteries. After its launch on Christmas Day 2021, NASA carefully unfolded the telescope's sunshield and gold-plated primary mirror on January 8, 2022. The telescope -simply known as Webb - then travelled 1.5 million kilometres until, on January 24, 2022, it arrived in a position called L2, the second sun-Earth Language point, a gravitationally stable area in space that it will orbit. At this distance it is beyond the reach of any manned vehicle for servicing, and there will be no physical human contact with it ever again. (The Hubble Space Telescope, by comparison, is in low-Earth orbit, approximately 600 kilometres above the surface of the planet.) Webb will be looking back in time to around a quarter-of-a-billion years ago when the first stars and galaxies started to form. According to NASA: "We are going to be looking at things we've never seen before and looking at things we have seen before in new ways."
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