File photo of the primary mirror of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope from March 2020, following a deployment test.

Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

JWST Images provides the latest news, images, and videos for the James Webb Space Telescope as it begins its primary mission.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25, 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. The telescope arrived at the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point in January 2022.

The first image from JWST was released to the public via a press conference by President Joe Biden and NASA on July 11, 2022. The telescope is the official successor of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) as NASA's flagship mission in astrophysics.

The James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal mirror segments made of gold-plated beryllium that combine to create a 6.5-meter-diameter (21 ft) mirror. In comparison, the primary mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in).

JWST has a light-collecting area of about 25 square meters, about six times that of Hubble. Unlike Hubble, which observes in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared (0.78–3 μm) spectra, JWST observes in a lower frequency range, from long-wavelength visible light (red) through mid-infrared (0.6–28.3 μm).

The James Webb Space Telescope must be kept extremely cold, below 50 K (−223 °C; −370 °F), such that the infrared light emitted by the telescope itself does not interfere with the collected light. It is deployed in a solar orbit near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth, where its five-layer sunshield protects it from warming by the Sun, Earth, and Moon.