In December of 2021, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into a deep orbit with the Sun, almost a million miles from the Earth. It was NASA’s top science priority - the most ambitious telescope ever made - and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The project marks the culmination of the careers of George and Marcia Rieke, a world-renowned husband-and-wife research team from the University of Arizona. They played a part in designing two of the four main instruments on the breakthrough telescope, which together might be capable of catching a glimpse of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

Making of the James Webb Space Telescope