James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas morning 2021 and then performed the most complex deployment in spaceflight history: 344 single points of failure as it unfolded a tennis-court-sized sunshield and a 21-foot mirror of 18 gold-coated beryllium segments while cruising to a gravitational balance point a million miles from Earth. Every step worked.

Webb sees the infrared universe with a sensitivity a hundred times beyond Hubble’s, capturing galaxies whose light has traveled more than 13.4 billion years, weather maps of exoplanet atmospheres, and star-forming nebulae in startling detail. Its first deep field, revealed in July 2022, packed thousands of galaxies into a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand at arm’s length — and it has been rewriting cosmic history ever since.