On October 12, 2021, the James Weber Space Telescope arrived at the port of Pariacabo in French Guiana, where it was shipped to a spaceport in Europe and unboxed in a clean room. It is now preparing to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket in December. Although the telescope weighs only 6 tons, it is more than 10.5 meters high and nearly 4.5 meters wide when folded. It is packed in a 30-meter-long container in a folded state, and with auxiliary equipment, it weighs more than 70 tons.
Upon arrival at the port, the telescope inside the container was towed by a heavy-duty towing device to the spacecraft processing facility at the European spaceport.
There, Weber's special transport container was opened and the telescope was disassembled in the clean room of the facility and mounted on an overturned fixture so that it was raised vertically. That's what it looks like next inside the fairing on Ariane 5.
Weber's launch involved more than 100 experts, each of which will prepare the telescope and launch vehicle separately until they become a joint team that combines the telescope and its rockets to carry out the process of lift-off that has been prepared for many years and has a significant place in the history of astronomical research.
Weber will be the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space. As part of an international cooperation agreement, ESA is using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle to provide the launch service of the telescope. In collaboration with partners, ESA is responsible for developing and qualifying Ariane 5's adaptability for the Weber mission and for procuring launch services by ArianeSpace.
Weber is an international partnership program between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The Webb telescope has an extremely eye-catching 6.5 m (21 ft) diameter main mirror. Hubble's main mirror is 2.4 meters (about eight feet) in diameter, so the former far exceeds the capabilities of the latter, but the two projects will run in parallel for some time.
The Webb telescope will rely on greater sensitivity to look deeper into the infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as the interiors of the dust nebulae that form stars and their systems.
