Spacecraft · tracked live
James Webb Space Telescope
The largest telescope ever flown: a 6.5-metre segmented mirror behind a sunshade the size of a tennis court, which has to unfold itself after launch because nothing that size fits in a rocket. It works in the infrared, cooled to about −233 °C, which is what lets it see the first galaxies and look through dust into the places where stars are forming.
- Agency
- NASA/ESA/CSA
- Launched
- 2021-12-25 - still working
- From the Sun
- 150,509,027 km (-37,033 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 1,417,955 km (+10,764 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 5 s
- Travelling at
- 30.3 km/s
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Path
A slow loop about L2, a balance point 1.5 million km further from the Sun than the Earth. There is nothing there to go round - the Sun and the Earth together hold it - and it takes about six months and a small burn every few weeks to stay on it.
Along the way
- Arrived at L2, a month after launch
- First pictures released
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.