Artistic rendition of the James Webb Telescope, courtesy of Northrop Grumman.

...has been completed and delivered to Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) by its teammate SEAKR Engineering, Inc., Centennial, Colorado. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor responsible for designing and developing the telescope for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

Operating like a digital video recorder, the spacecraft flight unit records all science data together with continuous engineering "state of health" telemetry for the entire observatory 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The recorder's capacity is 58.9 GB, and it is manufactured to withstand the extreme environment of space. The data is downloaded to the ground station when the telescope communicates with Earth during a four-hour window every 12 hours. The receiving center for Webb's data will be NASA's Deep Space Network, which supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations. The Network currently consists of three deep-space communications facilities placed approximately 120 degrees apart around the world: at Goldstone, in California's Mojave Desert; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia. This strategic placement allows for constant observation of spacecraft as the Earth rotates, and helps make the Network the largest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system in the world.

Successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope is the world's next-generation space observatory. It will be the most powerful space telescope ever built. Webb will observe the most distant objects in the universe, provide images of the very first galaxies ever formed and study planets around distant stars. The Webb Telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.