-[narrator] Tension, -[counting down in French]
and then triumph... - [counting down in French]
as NASA launches the James Webb Space Telescope.
Deux. [speaking French]
This may be the telescope that actually observes the very
earliest days of our universe that we've never seen before.
[narrator] The James Webb will explore even further back
in time than the Hubble Space Telescope
to witness the birth of the first stars and galaxies,
and solve the mystery of how the first black holes formed.
The James Webb Space Telescope could even discover a second Earth.
For the first time, we'll be able to point at
a star in the sky and say, "That planet may even have life."
[narrator] It has taken over 20 years,
almost 10 billion dollars,
and thousands of scientists and engineers from 14 countries
to create the most advanced telescope ever built.
[Krystal Puga] There's been numerous sleepless nights.
We have one shot to make this right. It's gotta work.
It's gotta work.
[narrator] This is the story of a telescope
that will change the way we view our universe forever.
[narrator] The James Webb Space Telescope is in South America,
at the Kourou Space Center in French Guiana.
It will journey into space on board this,
an Ariane 5 rocket.
December 25th -- The rocket contains
415 tons of fuel,
and almost 10 billion dollars of space telescope
is mounted on top.
[Robinson] The global impact that this mission is gonna have,
it's hard to put dollars on it.
So cargo's pretty precious.
[narrator] In mission control, the final countdown has started.
If this team fails to identify any problems now,
in just a few moments, NASA's most precious
space craft would face disaster.
The James Webb Telescope is the future of astronomy.
NASA built it to fulfill a dream that began over 25 years ago.
[narrator] Over Christmas in 1995,
the Hubble Space Telescope took this extraordinary photo.
It's known as the Hubble Deep Field.
The whole idea was stare at one part of the sky for a long time
and let that light come in over and over these days.
And so in this tiny little speck on the sky,
barely visible, instead of nothing
they found thousands, not thousands of stars but thousands of galaxies.
Each galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars.
This was an image that just blew away all of us astronomers.
This resulted in the deepest image ever up to that time of our universe.
This was astounding.
[narrator] There are about 3,000 galaxies in the image.
Most of them had never been seen before.
Some are near but some are incredibly far away.
Even though light is going extremely fast,
186,000 miles per second,
it takes time for light to actually travel to us.
[narrator] The farther we look out into space,
the deeper we look back in time.
We see the Moon as it was one second ago,
the Sun as it was eight minutes ago.
Light from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri,
takes four years to reach us.
We see the nearest large galaxy like our own,
Andromeda, as it was two and half million years ago.
As our telescopes gaze deeper, we look further back
to a time around 13 billion years ago when galaxies were infants.
This is just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang itself.
But that's where our observations with Hubble stop.
What lies beyond remains a mystery.
It's frustrating. These objects are just out
of the range of the Hubble Space Telescope.
So even though we may be only going back, say, you know, half a billion years more,
that's when that first generation of stars turned on.
[narrator] If astronomers could beyond Hubble and lift
the veil on this earliest time of the universe,
they could uncover important new clues about how
the universe and everything in it was born.
At the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore,
scientists were already working up ideas for Hubble's successor.
It was called the Next Generation Space Telescope.
Together with NASA, they began work turning their initial ideas
into the telescope that would eventually become the James Webb.
We needed to make a telescope that was as sensitive as it could possibly be.
So, number one, it has to be big.
[narrator] Astronomers refer to a telescope as big if it has a big main mirror.
The bigger the mirror, the fainter the object the telescope can see.
The larger the primary mirror, the more photons,
the more light that you collect.
And when you're trying to look at things that are really dim,
you need a really big telescope to collect more photons.
[narrator] NASA's largest mirror currently in space
is on the Hubble Space Telescope,
a solid piece of glass over 7 feet in diameter.
The final design for the James Webb's mirror
is over six times the area of Hubble's
and nearly three times wider, over 21 feet across.
But the cargo hold on the biggest rocket available,
Ariane 5,
is just 15 feet wide.
So how can NASA get this monster mirror into space?
[narrator] The solution was inspired by what was then
the largest telescope on earth.
The Keck was spectacularly successful. The mirror's beautiful.
We started with the Keck Telescopes in mind.
Uh, they had been developed with segments about the size we were thinking of.
[narrator] The Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii,
has a mirror that's 32 feet across.
Instead of a single piece of glass, it's made of 36 hexagonal glass pieces.
The concept isn't so hard to come up with.
The details of how you really do it, that's hard.
Because after you've gotten separate pieces,
well what if they don't... The pieces don't match at the edges?
[narrator] The technology the Keck designers developed
to make lots of small mirrors behave like one giant mirror is called active optics.
It also offers a solution for the engineers
trying to fit the James Webb's mirror into the Ariane 5.
What we had to do was learn how to make motors that would adjust all these mirrors
into the right place, the right tilt and even the right curvature.
There are actuators on the back and there are these very precise sensors
that will measure fractions of a wavelength of light
so that we can keep the mirrors totally aligned.
[narrator] Instead of making a solid glass mirror for the James Webb Telescope,
the engineers decide to use 18 hexagonal segments
that can be adjusted individually.
Together they form the primary mirror.
Motorized wings fold the mirror's sides
so it fits into the Ariane rocket.
[John Mather] We knew that a telescope made out of segments
in the mirror would be required
so its basic points were really known right at the very beginning.
Exactly what was going to be inside, that had to be worked out.
[narrator] 2004, work begins on the primary mirror.
Engineers manufacture each of the 18 mirror segments from blanks two inches thick.
They make the mirrors from a light weight,
but strong metal called beryllium
that maintains its shape even in the cold of deep space.
Machines cut out a honeycomb structure
to support the mirror's reflecting surface.
[Scott Willoughby] The rocket can only push so much mass off of Earth.
Each mirror started as a, you know, a blank
and we machine away 95% of the metal.
[narrator] Each mirror measures over four feet across,
but weighs just 46 pounds.
With mirror construction underway, the engineers turn to a far greater challenges.
The telescope must capture light from distant galaxies that is no longer visible.
It will need to be sensitive enough to detect
the faint heat of a bumblebee as far away as the Moon.
[narrator] For 28 years,
the Hubble Space Telescope has produced many dazzling images,
but none have revealed more about our universe than one produced in 1995.
The Hubble Deep Field.
[Michelle Thaller] We saw objects that were ten,
eleven billion light years away.
We were looking across time to see what galaxies looked like
only a few billions of years after the start of the universe.
[narrator] Since then, by pushing Hubble
and other telescopes to their absolute limit,
astronomers have seen even further back into the past.
We've been able to see across almost 13 billion years of cosmic time.
Which is pretty good. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old.
[narrator] The oldest object we've seen so far is this.
Galaxy GN-z11.
[Illingworth] We were looking at one of these fields
and we realized that we had some very unusual galaxies.
This is just a tiny little dot of light at the limit of our instruments,
and we had four of those.
And we actually found that one of these
was four hundred million years after the Big Bang.
And so that means we're looking back in time 13.4 billion years.
13,000, 400 million years of time to see this object.
[narrator] But this tantalizing glimpse is the best
that Hubble can do.
In fact, we can't see any visible light from this far back in time.
It turns out that light itself changes
because the universe it's traveling through is also changing.
As light is traveling through the space between the galaxies,
that space is expanding.
And it turns out that the wavelength of light gets stretched out
by the exact same amount space expanded
while the light was traveling through it.
[Thaller] So starlight that could have begun as visible light
traveling from billions of years across the expansion of the universe,
it's now dropped down into infrared.
[narrator] To see the first stars and galaxies,
we need a powerful new telescope
that can detect that infrared light.
And detecting infrared light isn't that hard
on Earth at least.
When we look at objects in the infrared,
we're looking at what we call thermal radiation.
[Thaller] I am producing my own light simply because I am warm.
So this is where you can actually see things in the dark.
And now an entirely different universe lights up
because by warm, I mean basically anything with any temperature.
Things that are incredibly cold to humans,
things that are hundreds of degrees below zero.
You can actually see the glow.
[narrator] But any heat from the James Webb telescope
will also give off infrared light.
And this could drown out the tiny signals coming from distant galaxies.
We needed to make a telescope that was as sensitive as it could possibly be.
It has to have the best camera chips.
So we pushed and pushed to get better nad better ones.
And better means not only more pixels,
like you would have in your pocket camera,
but also, essentially perfect.
So it is so good that overall if you were a square centimeter insect,
one bumblebee hovering at the distance of the Moon away from the Earth,
which is about, what, 400,000km,
then we would be able to see you in a time exposure.
[Meyers] To allow these extraordinarily
sensitive camera chips to do their job,
the James Webb Telescope will have to be cooled to -370 degrees Fahrenheit.
But that means a big threat to the mission is the power of the Sun.
It's energy could heat the spacecraft up
and blind the sensitive infrared detectors.
The breakthrough was realizing that space itself could be used to cool the telescope.
If you keep it from looking at hot things in space,
and you look only at the empty space.
Structures radiate their heat into this depth of outer space and they cool down.
[Meyers] The temperature of space in our part of the solar system
is -447 degrees Fahrenheit.
Only 12 degrees above absolute zero,
the lowest possible temperature.
But the side of the telescope exposed to the Sun
will heat up to 230 degrees Fahrenheit.
It will be bombarded with infrared radiation,
drowning out the faint infrared light from the distance stars
the telescope is trying to detect.
But if the engineers design a large reflector,
and angle the telescope so the shield always blocks the Sun,
temperatures on the dark side should lower dramatically,
and keep the heat sensitive equipment super cooled.
Here in Huntsville, Alabama,
engineers are building the James Webb Telescope's critical sunshield.
[Mike Helba] The design of the sunshield actually is very complex.
It's not just an insulating blanket.
There's a specific shape to the sunshield, a parabolic shape.
And the heat actually bounces between the layers and out the sides of the sunshield.
The curvature of each layer is very slightly different that allows the heat
to radiate out from between the layers into space.
[Meyers] The sunshield is exposed to the harsh environment of space
with its extremes of temperature
and the constant threat of meteorites.
So the material NASA chose is a space age polymer film called Kapton.
[Helba] It's thin, it's strong,
and it's coated to provide the heat protection that the telescope needs.
This is layer one, which is the Sun facing layer, it's 2000ths of an inch thick.
It's coated with silicon on the Sun facing side
because that emits the heat better.
It's coated with aluminum on the other side.
[Meyers] September, 2013,
construction of the first sunshield layer begins.
It takes three years to complete all five layers.
But the sunshield will only work if the telescope
is in the right region of space.
Unlike Hubble, which orbits the Earth,
the new telescope will travel 1 million miles away.
To a stable position for satellites known as the second Lagrange point, L2.
Here it will circle the Sun at the same speed as the Earth
in a secondary halo orbit.
The heat of the Sun, Earth, and Moon always hits it from the same side,
and can be blocked with a giant sunshield.
But this remote orbit is too far from Earth
to send a repair mission if anything goes wrong.
Our orbit that we're in precludes humans from going and fixing it.
Not many observatories have a design really for servicing.
That is not the way Webb was designed.
[Meyers] This makes the James Webb Space Telescope
one of NASA's riskiest projects ever.
They only have one shot.
It's a $10 billion roll of the dice.
[Meyers] In Richmond, California,
technicians grind and polish the 18 hexagons,
that make up the James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror.
These machines were custom designed and built to process the James Webb mirrors.
You want the curve of the entire surface to be as near perfect as possible.
And one of the challenges is having the optical surface be really, really good quality
out to the very edge.
[Meyers] The whole mission depends entirely
on how accurate these mirrors are.
[Feinberg] Well, if we don't make our telescope
really well, we'll get blurry images.
So if we want a really crisp, crisp images and we want to do really, you know,
science with objects that are very close together.
You need to make a very smooth mirror
that is the exact shape that you want.
I use to tell people it's the mirror's stupid.
You know, if we can make the mirrors, we can do this mission.
We have to have a mirror who's deviations are 1/5000ths of a human hair.
So that's how tiny they are.
They're so microscopic you would not even be able to see them.
[Daniel] If the mirror was the size of the United States,
we'd be talking about bumps that were, you know,
a few inches maybe a foot, something like that.
Awfully smooth.
[Meyers] The next process, adding a layer of pure gold.
Technicians place each mirror in a vacuum chamber.
And then, they inject a tiny amount of vaporized gold,
which sticks to the surface of the beryllium.
[Feinberg] Well, it turns out, gold actually reflects infrared light extremely well.
And it's a very, very thin layer.
So, um, it's not like we're using, you know,
huge quantities of gold to do this.
[Meyers] It's less than two ounces of gold,
just 100 nanometers thick across all 18 mirrors.
Enough to make about a dozen wedding rings.
[Feinberg] The mirrors on Webb have some of the highest reflectivity
of any infrared mirror's that we've ever made.
Uh, which is great, because when you're
trying to see these very dim objects,
you don't want to lose any photons,
you want every one of them to be reflected into the instruments.
[Meyers] At 21 feet across,
James Webb's mirror is the largest to be launched into space.
But it needs to be to allow us
to explore further back in time than any other telescope.
[Michelle Thaller] The beginning of the universe was incredibly dynamic,
and things were changing very, very fast.
There must have been this incredibly intense era
of star formation, maybe giant stars, everything blowing up,
that initial creation of the elements that lead to things like life.
That's what we're looking for.
[explosion]
[narrator] A few hundred million years after the Big Bang,
clouds of hydrogen and helium gas collapsed under their own gravity
to create the first stars.
But scientists think they would have looked very different
from the stars we see today.
This first generation would be just hydrogen, little bit of helium.
A star would behave entirely differently.
They may have been huge.
[Hakeem Oluseyi] Hydrogen and helium stars did not emit light
as efficiently as later stars.
So these first stars were super massive.
They lived short times and then explode violently.
[explosion]
[Rigby] When they blow up and they're dying,
they make tons of the stuff we're made of.
Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron,
all those heavy elements.
[narrator] Some astronomers suspect that when these first stars exploded,
they also sometimes collapsed into massive black holes.
Clusters of these monster black holes merged
to form even larger super massive black holes,
around 40 billion times the mass of our sun.
At least, that's the theory.
But until the James Webb, we've never had a telescope able to see far enough
to tell us what happened so long ago.
So scientists still have many questions.
[Thaller] Were there stars that were a thousand times the mass of the sun?
Did they come together, and then almost immediately blow up into huge black holes?
We see gigantic black holes,
but we see them only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
That's incredible. What formed these giant black holes so fast?
[narrator] Scientists would also like to use the James Webb Telescope
to investigate how these tumultuous events
produce the galaxies we see today.
[Rigby] We really don't know what the first generation of galaxies were like.
So we don't know how it all gets kickstarted.
We don't know what was going on in their centers to make, uh...
With the super massive black holes.
We know today every galaxy has a really big black hole in its center.
We don't know when all that got started.
And we don't know whether the seeds of those black holes were big or small.
We started off with these two competing ideas for how galaxies formed.
One idea is that a big cloud of gas collapses down to make a galaxy.
The second idea is that several smaller clouds of gas
collide to build up a larger galaxy.
It seems like the answer is a combination of both.
Uh, but we don't know because we've never observed the first galaxies forming.
With the Webb Space Telescope, we can finally make those observations.
[Thaller] Think about how profound that is.
With the James Webb Space Telescope
we're seeing that last bit to see the first stars come to light.
[narrator] And that will only happen if the enormous,
complex, and multi-layered sunshield is deployed perfectly in deep space.
It's one of the biggest engineering challenges NASA has ever faced.
[narrator] July 2014.
In Los Angeles, California, engineers at Northrop Grumman
are assembling a sunshield for the James Webb Space Telescope.
They have many challenges to overcome.
[James Flynn] How do we take such a large, you know, thin structure
and be able to fold it up, get it to fit into a rocket,
and then have really high confidence that we can deploy that in space?
[narrator] Engineers decide that the best way to deploy the sunshield
is with a complex system of cables, motors, and pulleys.
You know, you're gonna need to tension it with some form of cables,
because it has to start off soft and foldable,
and then pull to a taut, you know, tension kind of thing.
[narrator] They use a full-scale test sunshield
to figure out the best way to pull it tight.
It must work perfectly in space where repairs are impossible.
Once it's launched,
the sunshield should take about three days to fully deploy.
It's gonna be very stressful when we do it on orbit because it's away from us,
because we can't touch it, right?
Because we can only command the motors.
But in theory, it should happen easier. [laughs]
You know, than when we were trying to do it and offload gravity on the ground.
[narrator] November 2015.
All 18 mirror segments have arrived
at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Now, workers can begin attaching them
to the backplane that will hold them together.
In February 2016,
the stunning 21-foot wide primary mirror is finally complete.
Engineers are already installing the scientific instruments.
[Rigby] Webb is chock-full of four very capable science instruments.
I would say it's like a Swiss Army knife,
but there aren't Swiss Army knives with as many different features.
We have 18 observing modes on Webb.
We can do spectroscopy, we can do imaging,
we can do coronagraphy, which is blinking at the star
and looking at the faint planet that's nearby.
Um, we have these quarter of a million microshutters,
which can open and close individually, so we can simultaneously take spectra,
look at the rainbows of 30 or 40 objects at a time.
Webb can also use more than one science instrument at a time,
so that we are gathering data from multiple modes at once
and in a really efficient way.
[narrator] May 2016, all the infrared cameras and instruments are in place.
Only now can the mirrors and the scientific instruments be tested together.
It's a critical moment.
Forty years earlier, engineers making the mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope
made a drastic mistake.
The conclusion we've come to is that there's a significant spherical aberration
in the optical telescope system optics.
[narrator] They had carefully crafted the mirror into the wrong shape.
The images were blurry.
I worked Hubble for almost 20 years,
so I was actually in the control center
when they announced the spherical aberration
so I know how it feels
to have this kind of a problem.
[narrator] Hubble's engineers checked the mirror before launch
with a faulty testing process.
They actually had two independent pieces of test equipment
that tested the mirror.
They just decided to believe the one that they thought was more precise.
And it turned out the test device they thought was precise
was actually precisely wrong.
[narrator] May 2017, NASA's Johnson Spaceflight Center.
Engineers test the James Webb Space Telescope's complete optical system
in a vacuum chamber that simulates the freezing conditions of space.
It's something that was never done on Hubble.
[Scott Willoughby] So we took that optic, fully deployed it,
put it in a chamber, hung it from the ceiling,
so it was called cup-up, right?
So imagine, you know, the mirror looking up,
you know, like that dish at the bottom.
All of that got tested, 100 straight days, 24/7 testing,
and in the end it actually proved that the optic worked.
We've tested multiple times as a full assembly,
and we've tested multiple times at the full observatory level.
We've tested it every way we know how.
[man on radio] start on up again.
[narrator] With the Hubble Space Telescope,
NASA had a second chance.
Once repaired, it went on to produce
the most stunning views of our universe
the world had ever seen.
If the James Webb Space Telescope
is going to be a worthy successor,
it's critical that engineers make sure it unfolds correctly in space.
[narrator reading]
In Los Angeles, workers start to join the mirror half of the telescope
to the section holding the sunshield.
[Scott] When we took those two halves
and we lowered that on in there,
I stood in the window every moment of that
watching it lower down and lower down
and then released the weight.
And when you finally realized the weight is no longer on the crane...
Yeah, it's an emotional moment, right?
For some folks, you know, this has been a significant portion of their careers.
[narrator] After 15 years of construction,
the James Webb Space Telescope is finally complete.
The instruments it carries on board will revolutionize a new field of astronomy.
[Michelle Thaller] To me, one of the most profound impacts of the Webb Telescope
is the observations of exoplanets.
These are planets outside our own solar system,
planets that are going around other stars in the sky.
[Hakeem Oluseyi] Exoplanets excite our imagination,
because life forms, like ourselves, live on planets.
And one of the biggest questions we have is,
"Are we alone in the universe?"
Well, pondering the question is one thing,
making direct observations and getting a real answer is another.
And Webb is going to allow us
to probe the atmospheres of any planets we find.
[narrator] Back in the 1980s,
the only planets anyone knew about
were the ones circling our sun.
[Thaller] We figured that the sun couldn't be the only star with planets.
But we didn't have any proof of it.
Because the planets are very small and very hard to see.
But then things change
when we realized that we could detect exoplanets.
By just looking for the dimming of a star
when the planet passed in front of it.
And we designed satellites,
specifically just to look for that dimming of the light.
And if the same dimming pattern came back again, and again, and again,
we realized we'd caught a little planet.
And all of a sudden there were hundreds of exoplanets then thousands.
And as I speak there are close to
5,000 known exoplanets.
So just in 20 years of my life
a few, a smattering,
and now a sky full of planets.
[narrator] Despite discovering thousands of exoplanets
scientists know very little about them.
[Thaller] To this date all we know is
a rough idea of the size and the mass
and how close it is to the star.
We don't know whether there are clouds or oceans.
Whether there's an environment that would be friendly to life.
All we can give you are the most rudimentary specs of that planet.
[narrator] If there is life on a planet out there
the James Webb Space Telescope could detect it.
[Oluseyi] When the planet passes in front of the star
the light from that star will pass through that planet's atmosphere.
And then Webb can capture that light
and look at the spectrum of that planetary atmosphere
and look for what we call biomarkers,
signatures of gasses
what may indicate that there is life on that world.
[Thaller] Webb will have the power to
collect enough light
and then spread it out
and de-code what chemicals must have made that light.
[Oluseyi] There is no single molecule that says, "Hey,
this is evidence that there is life here."
But in combination
there are certain molecules
which are strong indicators of life.
We're entering an age where we can say,
"This planet has water.
This planet has methane.
This planet has a temperature very similar to ours."
It could even be something as profound as we can detect
the presence of plant life, chlorophyll.
What if we detect a planet
that has pollution.
What if we detect some sign of industrial activity, technology.
That's gonna get a lot deeper.
We might be on the cusp of saying
that there other beings up there that might be looking back at us.
[narrator reading]
In the clean room in Los Angeles,
Engineers must ensure the finished telescope
will unfold once it reaches space.
The most critical test,
is to deploy the sun shield.
You release a bunch of mechanisms,
and then you pull out one side,
and then you pull out the other side
but we're on the ground, that mid boom that pulls out
half of the sun shield, it wants to droop
and sag, right? So we have to off load it,
counter balancing gravity, right, each step of the way.
[narrator] The membranes unfold,
now they must be pulled apart to create the five layer sun shield.
[James Flynn] You've got three cables at each corner
so you have 90 cables that are basically tensioning this membrane system
You want it tensioned so you get a controlled shape,
so the thermal performance, you know works as predicted.
Each layer will tension one at a time, starting with layer one,
layer five being the last one to tension.
So, it's a sequential tensioning of the... all five layers.
[narrator] The sun shield is finally complete.
Over the next two years,
nearly every part of the telescope is deployed and redeployed
until NASA is convinced that it will work in space.
So, when we go to the last deployment deployed, uh, just right.
Uh, which is what we wanted to see.
Uh, so, it's all the testing, we saw multiple deployments, we've made corrections,
and I think, now it's ready to go.
[narrator] Now, they must fold it up for the final time.
It's like packing a ten billion dollar parachute.
[narrator reading]
In the clean room, in Los Angeles,
the crew pack the telescope, ready for launch.
Making sure not to forget to remove the lens cap.
This is the one operation that they can't get wrong.
When you stow Webb for the last time on Earth,
you're setting really the probability of success in orbit.
It's... It's as simple as that.
[narrator] The team then encases the telescope in its purpose built container,
to keep it clean on the journey to the launch site
in French Guiana.
On September 26th, 2021,
the telescope departs Los Angeles,
loaded onto a special ship, designed to carry rocket parts.
Cruising at 15 Knots, it spends 16 days at sea,
and travels 5,800 miles
before arriving at it's launch site in Kourou,
on the northeast coast of South America.
December 25th, 2021.
The James Webb Space Telescope is now ready for launch.
Its Ariane 5 rocket is fully fueled.
Mission control give a go for launch.
Go. [speaking French]
[narrator] Everyone is on edge.
[counting down in French] Six, cinq, quatre, trois,
deux. [indistinct]
- And lift-off. - [speaking French]
[man] Decollage, lift-off from a tropical rainforest
to the edge of time itself.
James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth
of the universe.
[narrator] The rocket, now in the upper atmosphere,
jettisons its fairing.
Then the first stage separates.
[man] We are expecting Webb separation
at the 27-minute, 7-second mark here into the flight.
At that point, uh, it will be on its own.
[speaking French]
[cheering and applause]
[narrator] The next few hours will
determine mission success or failure.
The actuations start as early as 30 minutes after launch,
to deploy our solar array and then they continue on.
[narrator] Three days into the mission,
Webb deploys the pallets holding the sun shield.
Next it raises the tower
to separate the sun shield from the telescope and instruments.
Now comes the most challenging operation,
unfolding the sunshield itself.
The protective covers roll back.
Inside the telescopic poles electric motors start pushing out the mid-booms.
Now, eight motors, pulling on 90 cables
running over 400 pulleys,
start to separate the sun shield's five layers
it all must work for the sun shield to be complete.
Everything has to get done, unfolded,
before we get out to our orbit,
which is a million miles away from Earth.
Everything out there is so cold,
that if we don't get things unfolded on the way, it will freeze up.
[narrator] The final major operation
unfolding the wings of the giant primary mirror.
Twenty-nine days after launch, the telescope should be complete.
[Thaller] It is gonna be a long time until I can relax.
I am not going to be relieved until I see those first images,
and we see that they look beautiful.
So, I have several months ahead of me of being pretty nervous and on the edge.
And after that I'm expecting joy.
[narrator] Thirty days after launch, Webb reaches it's destination.
Lagrange point 2, one million miles from Earth.
When the telescope has cooled down,
engineers will carry out the delicate task of aligning it's primary mirrors.
It's a painstaking process that takes two months.
Only then, six months after launch
will the Webb be ready to take its first pictures,
and transmit them across their five second journey, back to earth.
The first images are the thing that really motivates me.
When we see those images, and you know,
it's something that the entire planet really can take part in.
I feel like that's gonna be an amazing moment.
[Rigby] I fully expect that the data will not only be
scientifically really important,
but will be compelling and awe inspiring
and help folks feel connected to the universe.
So, this is a really big moment for astronomy,
and it's a big moment for the world.
Here's a view of the universe we've never seen before, a new universe,
I am going to be absolutely giddy.