NASA's building the biggest, most powerful space telescope ever to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as primary explorer of the vast expanses of our universe.
Scheduled to launch in 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is currently under construction at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
At three stories tall, this telescope is a huge piece of extremely expensive technology.
In what will no doubt be a dazzling display, NASA says the telescope will "fold origami-style into an Ariane 5 rocket and deploy like a transformer once in space." Wow.
But, first, it must be safely stowed inside a C-5 cargo jet for transport to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for "space environment" testing in a humongous cryogenic chamber.
The telescope must get a clean bill of health and every system must be working perfecly or it's a complete bust.
Unlike Hubble, which is in low Earth orbit where NASA's been able to rendezvous and repair, JWST will be lofted nearly one million miles away to a "planetary parking lot," a Lagrangian point known as L2.
At Lagrangian points, a perfect balance of gravitational and centrifugal forces between Earth, moon and sun allow an object to sit nearly stationary.
So why a space-based telescope? For starters, you get beyond the light pollution and atmospheric gunk than blocks most of the light coming from "out there." We're talking about very, very faint light to begin with.
These telescopes are time machines.
Because of the speed of light and the vast distances of the universe, the further out we look through the JWST, the further we see back in time.
In the above video, JWST Deputy Project Scientist for Operations, Jane Rigby, discusses details of the new telescope with Burton Fitzsimmons.