The inside story of the James Webb Space Telescope follows the NASA team building the £8 billion telescope and the scientists taking its first image of distant stars and galaxies.

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.

The team must build a mirror six times larger than Hubble’s and construct a vast sunshield the size of a tennis court, fold them up so they fit into an Ariane 5 rocket, then find a way to unfold them in space. Will this be the deepest image of our universe ever taken?