Early on Christmas morning, NASA’s revolutionary new space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, was successfully launched into space after blasting off atop a European Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. The launch marked the beginning of one of NASA’s most anticipated missions in decades, a program begun more than two decades earlier and costing $11 billion, which promises to transform the way we study the depths of the Universe. Thus began the long journey toward an orbit around the L2 Lagrangian point of the Earth-Sun-JSWT system.
