DISCOVER THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE ADVENTURE
Discover the IMAX film Deep Sky, the adventure of the JWST telescope on a giant screen and learn more about the breathtaking cooperation around this space observatory.
Relive its lift-off at the top of Ariane 5 and become passengers in a machine that travels through the cosmos and time.
LEARNING MORE ABOUT OUR SOLAR SYSTEM
- How stars are born and how they die,
- Can other worlds outside our Solar System harbour life?
- How did the first galaxies form?
- These island universes that contain hundreds of billions of suns?
All these questions, and more, are at the heart of the quest for knowledge being pursued by the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, or simply the Webb.
THE TELESCOPE: A TIME MACHINE
A telescope is in fact a time machine, because the further back it looks, the closer it gets to the origins of the universe. Thanks to its 6.5 m diameter mirror, the largest ever sent into space, and its unprecedented infrared capabilities, the Webb goes back 300 million years after the Big Bang, revealing the period when the first galaxies were forming.
AN INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION
A gigantic technological challenge, the Webb was initiated more than 20 years ago by NASA, which joined forces with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It took two decades to develop a folding mirror made of 18 hexagons coated with a thin film of gold and aligned with a precision equivalent to one ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair! Not to mention an impressive sunshield the size of a tennis court, also folded to fit under the launcher’s fairing.
And it was Ariane 5, the European launcher, that was responsible for sending the Webb 1.5 million kilometres to its workstation, far from the disturbances of the Earth.
