GREENBELT, Md. — The next great space telescope spread its golden wings this month.
Like the petals of a 20-foot sunflower seeking the light, the 18 hexagonal mirrors that make up the heart of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescopewere faced toward a glassed-in balcony overlooking a cavernous clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center here.
Inside the room, reporters and a gaggle of space agency officials, including the ebullient administrator Charles Bolden, were getting their pictures taken in front of the giant mirror.
Now, after 20 years with a budget of $8.7 billion, the Webb telescope is on track and on budget to be launched in October 2018 and sent a million miles from Earth, NASA says.
The telescope, named after NASA Administrator James Webb, who led the space agency in the 1960s, is the long-awaited successor of the Hubble Space Telescope.