A collective sigh of relief has echoed around the global astronomy community this month.

The James Webb Space Telescope has successfully completed its incredibly complex deployment sequence and arrived at its final destination: the L2 Lagrange point, nearly a million miles from Earth.

Watching the telemetry confirm the tensioning of the tennis court sized sunshield and the unfolding of the golden primary mirror wings was genuinely nail-biting. There were over 300 single points of failure in the deployment process, and a snag in any one of them could have doomed the entire mission. The engineering precision required to pull this off autonomously in deep space is nothing short of miraculous. Now, the slow and steady process of cooling down and aligning the optics begins.

Webb's Deployment