The James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful telescope ever placed into orbit, will give scientists the ability to peer farther back in time than ever before while helping solve puzzling mysteries such as the existence of alien life.

The successor to the legendary Hubble Space Telescope, "Webb" (as the JWST is affectionately called), will be launched into space in October 2018 on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. It will operate near the Earth-Sun L2 (Lagrange) point, some 1.5 million kilometers beyond the Earth. It's expected to remain operational for at least five years with 10 years being the maximum.

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In that time, the monster primary mirror of the JWST will allow scientists to look farther back into time, closer to the beginning of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. In this aspect, JWST is a time machine capable of seeing way back to almost the beginning of everything.

Its massive mirror will be capable of detecting the light from the first stars to be born in the Universe and will discover much fainter objects. Scientists will use Webb to study every phase in the history of the Universe.

They expect JWST to become be the world's premier observatory for the next decade as it will be a tool used by thousands of astronomers worldwide. JWST was designed to observe in the infrared sine the most distant galaxies in the Universe can only be detected in this band.

"By studying those faint, distant galaxies, astronomers hope to understand when the first stars began to form and what the first galaxies were like," said ICRAR-Curtin University astrophysicist Dr Rob Soria. "Using the new scope, scientists can gauge how quickly the earliest galaxies formed, pulled together by gravity."

NASA engineers recently revealed the heart of the JWST: the massive primary mirror that's seven times bigger than Hubble's.  The primary mirror is a 6.5 meter diameter, gold-coated beryllium reflector with a collecting area of 25 square meters.

Since the size of the mirror is far too large for existing launch vehicles, the mirror was designed as 18 hexagonal segments that will unfold after the telescope reaches orbit. The entire telescope will be four storeys tall.

TagsJames Webb Space Telescope, NASA, primary mirror