James Webb Space Telescope
NASA/ESA/CSA space infrared telescope launched in 2021
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope designed to conduct infrared astronomy. It is the largest telescope in space, and is equipped with high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments, allowing it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. This enables investigations across many fields of astronomy and cosmology, such as observation of the first stars and the formation of the first galaxies, and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.
Despite Webb's mirror diameter being 2.7 times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, it produces images of comparable resolution because it observes in the infrared spectrum, which has longer wavelengths than the Hubble's visible spectrum. The longer the wavelength the telescope is designed to observe, the larger the information-gathering surface (mirrors in the infrared spectrum or antenna area in the millimeter and radio ranges) required to achieve the desired resolution.
The Webb was launched on 25 December 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. In January 2022, it arrived at its destination, a solar orbit near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth. The telescope's first image was released to the public on 11 July 2022.
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) led Webb's design and development and partnered with two central agencies: the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland managed telescope development, while the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore on the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University operates Webb.
The public source identifies “James Webb Space Telescope” as nASA/ESA/CSA space infrared telescope launched in 2021. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around James, Webb and Space.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q186447. VIAF identifies the subject as 129468073. The Library of Congress control number is nr97043411. 2 of 9 selected statements include explicit references; 7 carry qualifiers and 3 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2021 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Webb Space Telescope” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.