James Webb has officially reached its home, L2! L2, or Lagrange Point 2, is a specific area that orbits the Sun. It's about 930,000 miles from Earth and is a gravitationally stable location so Webb will not need to use much fuel to stay in orbit.
However, that's not the primary reason L2 was selected. Webb is going to be primarily looking at the universe in Infrared light and needs to be extremely cold. How cold? Approximately 50 Kelvin or -370 Fahrenheit. The sun shields are designed to block all the light coming from the Sun, Earth, and moon, but the positioning of L2 keeps the telescope locked in position with Earth so it doesn't need to turn at any point away from the Sun, the optics will always be shielded. It's gonna take another 5 months to finish the cooling and calibration, but come late June we should start seeing some amazing stuff!!
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