The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope designed primarily to conduct infrared astronomy.
As the largest optical telescope in space, its greatly improved infrared resolution and sensitivity.
Allows it to view objects with high resolution too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope.
This is expected to enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology.
JWST will observe in a lower frequency range, from long-wavelength visible light (red) through mid-infrared (0.6–28.3 μm).
JWST's primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal mirror segments made of gold-plated beryllium which combined create a 6.5-meter (21 ft) diameter mirror.
Compared with Hubble's 2.4 m (7.9 ft). This gives JWST a light-collecting area of about 25 square meters, about six times that of Hubble.
It is deployed in a solar orbit near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth.
To make observations in the infrared spectrum, JWST must be kept under 50 K (−223.2 °C; −369.7 °F); otherwise, infrared radiation from the telescope itself would overwhelm its instruments.
JWST is not intended to be serviced in space. A crewed mission to repair or upgrade the observatory, as was done for Hubble, would not currently be possible.
For GO Cycle 1 there were 6,000 hours of observation time available to allocate, and 1,173 proposals were submitted requesting a total of 24,500 hours of observation time.