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The first telescopes were made of two pieces of rounded glass in a tube.

“Where we had ignorance, we now have beautiful data.” Recently, in celebration of the telescope’s first year of science operations, the Webb team published an anniversary image of stars being born in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the stellar nursery closest to Earth. “There were predictions, but this was terra incognita, past the cliff of what Hubble could do, and expectations were all over the map,” Rigby told me. About a year after the telescope released its first images, Jane Rigby, the top NASA scientist working on the project, told me that it has “performed not only better than requirements but better than we could have possibly dreamed.” Recently, the Webb helped to show that galaxies in the first billion years of the universe were more active than previously thought, forming lots of stars in big bursts. Scientists then spent more than three months aligning its mirrors with nanometre precision. unfolded like a piece of origami, releasing an array of solar panels, a powerful antenna, a honeycomb of golden mirrors, and a sunshield that looks like a set of silver sails. Since the European Space Agency launched NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana, on Christmas Day, 2021, the telescope has hovered in space about a million miles from Earth.