$10 billion telescope set to launch, will peer to the edge of the universe

Scientists are on pins and needles, as one small misfire with the James Webb Space Telescope launch could derail the entire $10-billion project.

Santa won’t be the only one taking flight this Christmas Eve, as scientists prepare to launch a telescope that has its sights set on seeing, well, everything in the cosmos.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is set to take flight on Friday, marking the much-anticipated launch of the world’s largest and most expensive telescope to date.

The James Webb is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has not only provided stunning images, but has also been vital in providing scientific knowledge about our universe and its origins.

The Webb will be able to peer back in time, possibly to 100 million years after the Big Bang, reports The Atlantic. And not only do scientists think they can look back into galaxies from that time, but they also think they might be able to determine the composition of those galaxies.

“We can actually make detailed measurements of how much of every chemical element is in these distant galaxies,” Steve Finkelstein, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin who has been working on the project, told The Atlantic.

Finkelstein also said the Webb teams are bracing for some surprises.

“We could make a guess, ‘Okay, I think we’ll do this, I think we’ll see that’ — but we simply don’t know,” Finkelstein said. “We’re looking at the universe in a new way, and we don’t know what we’re going to discover.”

The Canadian Space Agency has contributed to the telescope, providing the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) and the Near-InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectograph, which will be capable of looking for exoplanets, detecting the atmosphere of small, habitable Earth-like planets and giving the ability “to peer inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today,” says a NASA fact sheet.