What the telescope’s incredible images show about how it operates – and the universe itself
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On Christmas Day last year, 30 years after its conception, the James Webb space telescope launched from French Guiana. On 28 December, it went past the moon. On 24 January, it fired its thrusters for five minutes and settled into its final orbit about 1.5m km from Earth. On 12 July, after months of painstaking setup, it produced its first image – showing us, for the first time, faraway galaxies as they were more than 13bn years ago.
The Webb telescope has been adding to this miraculous beginning ever since. Now it’s brought us something a little closer to home, a mere 615m km away: the most extraordinarily detailed images of Jupiter we’ve ever seen.
