The most powerful telescope ever built by human beings sits permanently parked 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, sheltered from the Sun by a folded shield the size of a tennis court — keeping one side of the spacecraft at minus 233 degrees Celsius while the other side reaches 85 degrees above zero, a temperature difference of more than 300 degrees across a single instrument that nobody can ever fly out to repair

The most powerful telescope ever built by human beings sits permanently parked 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, sheltered from the Sun by a folded shield the size of a tennis court — keeping one side of the spacecraft at minus 233 degrees Celsius while the other side reaches 85 degrees above zero, a temperature difference of more than 300 degrees across a single instrument that nobody can ever fly out to repair

No human being has ever been as far from Earth as the James Webb Space Telescope is right now. The Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon in 1969 travelled approximately 384,000 kilometres from their home planet — a record that has stood, unchallenged by any subsequent crewed mission, for the past 56 years. Webb sits at approximately four times that distance. Its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, has spent its entire operational life in…