Ariane 5

Two multi-ton geostationary communications satellites for Malaysian and Indian operators launched on a European heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket Wednesday from French Guiana, leaving four Ariane 5s left to fly before retirement.

A European Ariane 5 rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 5:50 p.m. EDT (2150 GMT) Wednesday with the Malaysian MEASAT 3d communications satellite and India’s GSAT 24 television broadcast spacecraft. This mission marked the Ariane 5 flight in six months.

Two geostationary communications satellites for India’s space agency and a Malaysian company will rocket into orbit from the jungle of South America on Wednesday on a European-built Ariane 5 launcher.

The James Webb Space Telescope fired its rocket thrusters for the first time late Saturday to line up for course toward an observing post nearly a million miles from Earth, then deployed a high-rate communications antenna Sunday to transmit science data to the ground.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a NASA-led international collaboration that took nearly 30 years and $10 billion to get to the launch pad, finally left Earth with a Christmas morning rocket ride from a European spaceport in South America, setting off on a mission to hunt for the first light in the universe. That was just the easy part.

An Ariane 5 rocket has lifted off from French Guiana on a mission to send the James Webb Space Telescope toward a point a million miles from Earth. The powerful European rocket blasted off at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT).

If you want to see the faint, stretched-out light from the first stars and galaxies that began shining at the end of the cosmic dark ages a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, you’re going to need a big telescope. But not just any big telescope.

Teams in French Guiana positioned a European Ariane 5 rocket into its starting blocks Thursday, ready for liftoff Christmas morning with the nearly $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, the most expensive science instrument ever to leave planet Earth.

Spaceflight Now’s Editor, Stephen Clark, speaks with NASA’s Keith Parrish, the commissioning manager for the Webb Space Telescope. It is his job to make sure the observatory unfolds and extends correctly. He talks us through the deployment sequence in the month after launch. Find out how shake, shimmy and twirl are in the ground controller’s tool box to fix anything that goes wrong.

Spaceflight Now’s Stephen Clark speaks to astronaut, astronomer and former NASA science head, John Grunsfeld about the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. What big discoveries is he expecting from JWST? Is he nervous about the complex process to unfold the telescope in space? Why did his efforts to prepare JWST for possible servicing fail?