James Webb Space Telescope lifts off on historic mission

The $10bn James Webb telescope has left Earth on its mission to show the first stars to light up the Universe.

The observatory was lifted skyward by an Ariane rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.

Its flight to orbit lasted just under half an hour, with a signal confirming a successful outcome picked up by a ground antenna at Malindi in Kenya.

Webb, named after one of the architects of the Apollo Moon landings, is the successor to the Hubble telescope.

Engineers working with the US, European and Canadian space agencies have built the new observatory to be 100 times more powerful, however.

“Lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself, James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the Universe,” said American space agency (Nasa) TV commentator Rob Navias at the moment the rocket left the Earth.

Lift-off was eagerly awaited but accompanied also by a good deal of anxiety. Thousands of people worldwide have worked on the project over the past 30 years, and even though the Ariane is a very dependable vehicle - there are no guarantees when it comes to rockets.

We covered this impressive telescope in the September issue of our magazine. Here’s how the article began:

The Hubble Space Telescope has been capturing incredible images of the cosmos for years. In 1995, it concentrated its lens for a 10-day exposure on a 24-millionth section of the sky, the diameter of a tennis ball about three football fields away, a spot that appears completely empty. Yet it yielded perhaps the most influential image ever taken for space exploration: the Hubble Deep Field.

This Hubble exposure captured light from approximately 3,000 galaxies. A typical galaxy can harbor 100 million to 100 billion stars. The image set the imaginations of astronomers and ordinary people around the world on fire.

One year later, work began on a new, even more advanced telescope that would ultimately become known as the James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists—and all of us—wanted to discover more.