© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
Morgane : It really feels like something to be here, right in front of this model of the Webb’s mirrors. You and I worked on the project for the real telescope for so many years.
Luca : You said it! And what an object... This large mirror can capture the infrared light of the 1st galaxies, which are 13.5 billion years old. It's crazy, isn't it?
Morgane : Yes, and here, we can only see the telescope mirrors. Up there, in space, with its sunshield to protect its instruments from the Sun’s heat and its solar panels, it is as big as a tennis court!
Luca : All those fit folded into the Ariane 5 rocket nose cone... like origami. Do you remember the launch, on Christmas Day in 2021, from the European Spaceport in Kourou, in French Guiana? It was magical, but also so stressful!
Morgane : Oh yes, I remember everything had to work, every step of the deployment. A single mistake and it was over! But it worked and the Webb reached its destination, around the Lagrange L2 point, 1.5 million km from Earth.
Luca : And the 1st images, a few months later... wow, it was crazy! Stars hidden in gas and dust clouds, galaxies from the beginning of the Universe, things we had never seen before, even with the Hubble Space Telescope! This is thanks to the observation of infrared light, invisible to the naked eye. Can you imagine? It comes from distant celestial objects and travels for billions of years before being captured by this large mirror.
Morgane : Yes, by the primary mirror but that’s not the end of it... it bounces towards the secondary mirror, which redirects it to the 4 scientific instruments located in the box at the back. And then, the data is transmitted to Earth to be analyzed!
Luca : It's incredible, really. With Webb, we are exploring the origins of the Universe but also distant solar systems and exoplanets. It may allow us, one day, to detect life elsewhere! Who knows?