Where the James Webb Space Telescope will be placed in space – knowledge

The giant James Webb telescope has just launched into space, where it is supposed to observe space unaffected by the shimmering earth atmosphere and earthly light pollution. Unlike its famous predecessor, the Hubble telescope, the Webb telescope will search the cosmos for infrared radiation, i.e. heat sources. And there is something else that distinguishes the new device: it will not orbit the earth in a normal orbit, but will start its work 1.5 million kilometers from our planet, at a so-called Lagrange point. Such places in space have to be imagined as quiet zones in the middle of the gravitational fields of the sun and earth. The forces of gravity cancel each other out there. From a mathematical point of view, there are five such Lagrangian points in a system of two orbiting bodies (earth and sun), two of which are so stable that you can actually place a device there, which from now on rotates at fixed distances from the sun and earth. The disadvantage of such a position in space is that no service missions are possible there, as was the case with the Hubble telescope. The big advantage is that the heat-sensitive Webb telescope will have the sun and earth behind it and will be able to see the vastness of space undisturbed.