Washington (AFP) – The most powerful space telescope ever built, the James Webb is set to deliver its first color science images to the world on Tuesday.

Here’s an overview of this feat of human ingenuity, in five key elements.

Over 21 feet

The centerpiece of the observatory is its massive main mirror, more than 21 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter and made up of 18 smaller, hexagonally shaped mirrors. The observatory also has four science instruments: cameras to take pictures of the Universe and spectrographs, which break up light to study what elements and molecules make up objects. The mirror and instruments are protected from our Sun’s light by a heat shield the size of a tennis court, consisting of five overlapping layers. Each layer is hair-thin, and together they ensure that the telescope operates in the darkness it needs to capture faint glows from the far reaches of the Universe.

Millions of miles away

Unlike the Earth-orbiting Hubble telescope, Webb orbits the Sun, nearly a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from us, or four times the distance from our planet to the Moon. It took the spacecraft almost a month to reach this region, called Lagrange Point two, where it remains in a fixed position behind Earth and the Sun to give it a clear view of the universe. Here, gravity from the sun and Earth balances out the centrifugal motion of a satellite, meaning that minimal fuel is needed for course correction.

13.8 billion years

In astronomy, the farther you see, the deeper you look back in time. Webb’s infrared capabilities are what make it uniquely powerful — allowing it to detect light from the first stars, which has been stretched into infrared wavelengths as the Universe expanded. This allows it to look further back in time than any previous telescope, to a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

A three-decade wait

The project was first planned in the 1990s, but construction did not begin until 2004. After that, Webb’s release date was repeatedly pushed back. Originally set for 2007, it finally took place on December 25, 2021, on an Ariane 5 rocket, from French Guiana.

10 billion dollars

Webb is an international collaboration between the US space agency NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), involving more than 10,000 people. The cost of living for NASA alone will be about $9.7 billion, according to a Planetary Society analysis, or $10.8 billion adjusted for inflation in 2020 dollars. © 2022 AFP