Possibly one of the biggest events to happen during our lifetime is about to happen on Dec. 18th of this year.

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on that very day. What is that? It’s the successor to the Hubble, only three times as large and 100 times more powerful. NASA has been working on it for 25 years and it’s a miracle they were able to complete it. It was almost canceled in 2011.

The technology on this telescope will launch nothing short of an astronomical revolution and two major historical events:

• We will be able to see if there is life on the exoplanets we’ve discovered and detect whether the atmospheres of those planets are being modified by that life.

• We will be able to see the first stars and galaxies ever created from the Big Bang.

That’s right, this telescope will literally look back in time to view the very first galaxies and allow us to witness the birth of our known Universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built. It will allow scientists to look at what our universe was like about 200 million years after the Big Bang. The telescope will be able to capture images of some of the first galaxies ever formed. It will also be able to observe objects in our solar system from Mars outward, look inside dust clouds to see where new stars and planets are forming and examine the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars.

The Webb telescope is as tall as a 3-story building and as long as a tennis court! It is so big that it has to fold origami-style to fit inside the rocket to launch. The telescope will unfold, sunshield first, once in space.

Serving as the successor to NASA’s Hubble Telescope, Webb will journey to a distant destination about 1 million miles from Earth known as a Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable spot between two celestial bodies. It will take Webb a month to get there after launch.

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is scheduled for Saturday, December 18, 2021 from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana, which is located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America.

Find more facts, photos, videos and more at the James Webb Space Telescope website, www.jwst.nasa.gov.