In about a month, the infrared telescope is expected to reach its orbit, one and a half million kilometers from Earth. It is intended to explore the early days of the universe 13 billion years ago, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. It is one of the largest scientific projects in history and heralds a new era in astronomy.
The new telescope was jointly developed by the US space agency NASA, the European space agency ESA and the Canadian space agency CSA. The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the University of Cologne, and several German companies also took part.
The project, which started in 1989, was originally supposed to go into operation in the early noughties. However, new problems delayed the project for years, and the costs tripled to almost ten billion dollars.
The new telescope far exceeds its predecessor “Hubble” in size and complexity. Its mirror is six and a half meters in diameter and had to be folded in order to even fit into the Ariane 5 rocket.
The launch of the rocket now also had to be postponed several times. The first delay was attributed to an accident during launch preparations in late November and the second to a communication problem.
