This documentary on the most powerful space telescope in the world aligns superlatives. And for good reason: at 8.5 meters high and weighing 6.5 tonnes, the James-Webb is the largest ever built. It mobilized thousands of engineers who worked there for years – some for a quarter of a century! It succeeds Hubble, to which we owe, since the 1990s, enormous progress in astronomy, in particular the discovery of thousands of galaxies in parts of space that were thought to be empty. The further a telescope sees, the further it goes back in time: Hubble went back 500 million years following the Big Bang. The James-Webb, also called the JWST, can see up to 200 million years following this zero moment of our Universe.
The JWST was sent 1.5 million kilometers from Earth
To get there, its design has known a path strewn with pitfalls: budgets and deadlines exceeded, hurricane, laborious tests leading to parliamentary hearings and even a controversy over the name of the project… It required miracles of engineering: equipped with With a tennis-court-sized sunshade and an 18-segment parabolic mirror, the telescope has been folded like an origami to fit in the fairing of its launcher – it will take eight days to deploy, carefully , in the space. Unlike Hubble, short-sighted in its infancy but whose adjustments have been made, no astronaut will be able to come and repair it, hence multiple checks: the JWST was sent 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, three thousand times farther than its predecessor and four times farther than the Moon.
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Launched from Kourou on December 25, 2021, the James-Webb produced its first images of the cosmos in July 2022. They are spectacular. “We discover baby stars and planets being born, which we had never been able to see before”explains an astrophysicist. “It’s like breaking the lock of a treasure chest”launches another. “Today, everything begins”assures a researcher: in fact, by revealing many unknown galaxies from its beginnings in a region as large in appearance as a grain of sand, the James-Webb promises fabulous discoveries.
Saturday December 17 at 10:30 p.m. on Arte. American documentary by Terri Randall (2022). 54 mins. ((Available in replay until September 19, 2027 on Arte.tv).
