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The dreams and work of a generation of astronomers set off on Saturday into an orbit around the sun in the form of the largest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built. The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, lifted off Saturday morning from a spaceport near the Equator in Kourou, French Guiana. Journey to the morning of time.

“The world gave us this telescope and today we are giving it back to Earth,” Gregory Robinson, program director of the Webb telescope, said at a post-launch press conference in French Guiana.

Named after the NASA administrator who led the space agency during the early years of the Apollo program, the telescope was designed to see farther and further into space than the lauded Hubble Space Telescope. The primary light-gathering mirror is 21 feet wide, about three times larger than Hubble, and seven times more sensitive.

Webb’s mission is to search for the oldest, most distant stars and galaxies that arose 13.7 billion years ago and burned their way out of a fog after the Big Bang (13.8 billion years ago).

Astronomers from around the world watching the launch from afar, many in their pajamas, jumped for joy.

“What an incredible Christmas present,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In an email exchange with other astronomers, Tod Lauer of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab reported his feeling about the launch: “Just the holiest of all space words, “Nominal!” referring to the language used by launch crews to describe rockets working as expected. found, he said.

“Thank God! – another holy word for now, Tod.”

Priyamvada Natarajan, a cosmologist at Yale, from India herself said, “Totally very happy! – Wow! Wow!”

At the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the center of Webb’s mission operations, a small group of scientists and NASA officials cheered and cheered as it launched.

The flight operations team at another part of the institute watched Webb deploy the solar array and, minutes later, the communications antenna. About 100 mission personnel will command the deployment of the spacecraft, switching between 12-hour shifts 24 hours a day as it begins its journey to a point beyond the moon.

“They have real work to do,” said Kenneth Sembach, the director of the institute. “Our teams have spent the last two years rehearsing countless times.”

Equipped with detectors sensitive to infrared or “heat radiation,” the telescope will paint the universe in colors no human eye has ever seen. The expansion of the universe shifts visible light from the oldest, farthest galaxies to longer infrared wavelengths.

Studying the heat from these baby galaxies could provide important clues as to when and how crouching supermassive black holes form at the centers of galaxies, astronomers say. Closer to the present, the telescope will sniff the atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby stars, looking for infrared signatures of life-related elements and molecules, such as oxygen and water.

Astronomers say Webb will study all billions of years of cosmic history – from the first stars to life in the solar system. This week, NASA administrator Bill Nelson called the telescope “a keyhole to the past.”

“It’s a shining example of what we can achieve when we dream big,” he said. “It’s a great day for planet Earth,” he said after launch.

The beginning of the telescope’s journey went unnoticed by the space agency’s payment executives in Congress, who have been committed to the project for decades.

“The successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope today marks a historic milestone in our progress in astrophysics and space science,” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat and chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said in a news release. .

Saturday’s successful launch spans 25 years of an expensive effort based on uncertainty, mistakes and ingenuity. Webb’s 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors, advanced temperature controllers, and ultra-precise infrared sensors have been put together in a development timeline fraught with cost overruns and technical barriers. Engineers had to invent 10 new technologies along the way to make the telescope much more sensitive than Hubble.

When NASA selected Northrop Grumman to lead the Webb’s construction in 2002, mission managers estimated it would cost between $1 billion and $3.5 billion and be launched into space in 2010. Overly optimistic schedule forecasts, occasional development accidents, and erratic cost reporting extended the timeline. It increased it by 2021, bringing the total cost to $10 billion.

Even its final trip to the launch pad seemed dangerous, as a mishap in the Kourou rocket bay, disconnected cables and alarming weather reports pushed Webb’s departure date deeper into December, until a Christmas morning launch could not be avoided.

“I am very happy today,” said Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency. But he added, “This is so frustrating, I couldn’t launch every day, it wouldn’t be good for my life expectancy.”

For astronomers and engineers, the launch was also an intriguing sight.

“It was hard to sleep last night,” said astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Adam Riess, who will use the Webb telescope to measure the expansion rate of the universe.

But the launch itself is only the first step in an even more dangerous journey that astronomers and rocket engineers have dubbed “six months of anxiety.”

The installation of the solar panel half an hour before flight was the first in a month-long series of maneuvers and deployments, which NASA calls “344 single points of failure.”

“I was finally able to start breathing again when the solar arrays showed up,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. “We’ve got some very tough days ahead of us, but you can’t start any of them until this part goes great.”

Among the most tense moments, astronomers say, will reveal a giant tennis court-sized sunscreen designed to keep the telescope dark and cool enough that its own heat doesn’t drown out the heat from distant stars. . The screen is made of five layers of a plastic called Kapton, which is similar to mylar and is as durable as mylar. It was occasionally torn during distribution rehearsals.

If all goes well, astronomers will begin to see the universe in a new light next summer. They look forward to what they least expect. As NASA’s associate director of science Thomas Zurbuchen said recently: “Every time we launch a big, daring telescope, we’re in for a surprise. This is the biggest and bravest of all.”

But if something goes wrong in the weeks and months ahead, the astronomy field’s view of the origins of existence may be jeopardized. In the 1990s, when problems plagued Hubble’s work, NASA sent astronauts aboard the space shuttles for repairs. The Webb telescope is heading to a point beyond the moon where no spacecraft has carried humans before (although Ms. Melroy says NASA is designing a spacecraft). robotic repair task if one was needed).

Dr. “I tell my non-astronomer friends that you don’t want to hear mostly anything 30 days after launch,” Riess said. “And we’ll be really happy if we hear nothing.”

Dennis Overbye of New York and Joey Roulette of Baltimore reported.