As NASA releases the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, this BBC Horizon film tells the inside story of the telescope's construction, and the astronomers taking its first picture of distant stars and galaxies. Will it be the deepest image of our universe ever taken?
The successor to Hubble, and a hundred times more powerful, the James Webb is the most technically advanced telescope ever built. It will look further back in time than Hubble, to an era around 200 million years after the Big Bang when the first stars and galaxies appeared. Webb's primary mission is to capture the faint light from these objects on the edge of our visible universe so scientists can learn how they formed, but its instruments are so sensitive it could also be the first telescope to detect signs of life on a distant planet.