How to track James Webb Space Telescope, mission timeline

Currently, more than 35,000 miles away, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is cruising through space on the way to its 1 million mile parking spot above the Earth. It will take the space telescope almost a month to complete orbital insertion. Here’s how you can track its way there.

FINAL UPDATE (1/31): James Webb is now fully deployed and orbiting in L2. The space telescope will spend the next few months commissioning and testing before taking its first photograph. Last week, NASA announced that Webb will point at HD 84406, a sun-like star 241 light-years away, to focus and align its mirrors in preparation for the moment we’ve been waiting for. Don’t hold your breath though, the mirror alignment process is very slow and tedious. We don’t expect James Webbs to take its first shot of the cosmos until around May 2022.

Quoting Eric Berger on Twitter, “…only about 10 percent of the mission risk has now been retired.” Now that JWST is safely off the Earth, the telescope will begin a busy 30 days of maneuvering, orienting, and deploying hundreds of mechanical parts, including a tennis court-sized heat shield. Needless to say, there’s still a lot of work to do before we’re officially in the clear.

Mission timline

NASA has a detailed plan to deploy the entire telescope in roughly two weeks and orbit within a month. However, the process involves hundreds of individual deployments that are human-controlled rather than automatic. This means engineers on the ground will remotely orchestrate a complex sequence of deployments and can alter the order, location, timing, and duration if needed. As of this moment, the order and approximate timing are as follows:

Time after launch	Event
~9 minutes	Main stage separation
~27 minutes	Upper stage separation
~30 minutes	Solar array deployed Occured Dec. 25, ~7:50 a.m. EST
~12.5 hours	Midcourse correction burn (MCC 1a) Occured Dec. 25, 7:50 p.m. EST
~1 day	Release and motion test of the gimbaled antenna assembly Occured Dec. 26, 10:00 a.m. EST
2 days	Midcourse correction burn (MCC 1b) Occured Dec. 27, 7:20 p.m. EST
3 days	Forward sunshield pallet deployment Aft sunshield pallet deployment Completed Dec. 28, 1:21 p.m. EST
4 days	Deployable tower assembly Occured Dec. 29, ~9:00 a.m. EST
5 days	Aft momentum flap Occured Dec. 30, 9:00 a.m. EST Sunshield covers release Completed Dec. 30, 12:27 p.m. EST
6 days	Sunshield port mid-boom and sunshield starboard mid-boom Completed Dec. 31, 10:13 p.m. EST
9 days	Sunshield layer tensioning begins Completed Jan. 3, 10:00 a.m. EST
10 days	Sunshield layer tensioning complete Completed Jan. 4, 12:00 p.m. EST
11 days	Secondary mirror deployment begins and is completed Completed Jan. 5, 11:27 a.m. EST
12 days	Aft Deployed Instrument Radiator Completed Jan. 6, 8:48 a.m. EST
13 days	Port primary mirror wing deployment begins and is completed Completed Jan. 7, 2:11 p.m. EST
14 days	Starboard primary mirror wing deployment begins and is completed Webb is fully deployed Completed Jan. 8, ~10:30 a.m. EST
16-24 days	Individual mirror segment movements Completed Jan. 19
29 days	Midcourse correction burn (MCC2)/L2 insertion burn
29.5 days	Orbit insertion complete. Webb is now orbiting L2. Telescope deployment complete.

How can I track James Webb’s live progress?

In typical NASA fashion, the space agency has put together a detailed data-driven page called Where is Webb?, which shows the status of Webb on its journey to L2 orbit. Here you can find things like distance from Earth, distance to parking orbit, progress percentage, current speed, temperature, and more.

Missed the JWST launch? No worries! Catch up with our James Webb live blog or on our Twitter.

Featured image credit: Adriana Manrique Gutierrez, NASA Animator

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