At which specific point is the James Webb Space Telescope positioned to ensure it moves around the Sun at the same rate as the Earth ?
Sun–Earth L2
The James Webb Space Telescope orbits the Sun–Earth L2 point, roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth on the side directly away from the Sun.
At a Lagrange point the combined gravitational pull of the Sun and the Earth supplies exactly the centripetal force a spacecraft needs to complete one revolution in the same time the Earth takes, so the telescope keeps station with the Earth instead of drifting into a different orbital period.
L2 is chosen over the other Lagrange points for a thermal reason. From there the Sun, the Earth and the Moon all lie in the same direction, so a single five-layer sunshield can block all three at once and hold the mirror and instruments near 40 K, which is what infrared observation requires.
The Earth–Moon points are useless here because they orbit the Earth rather than the Sun, and L1 lies on the sunward side, where the telescope would face the Sun and the Earth from opposite directions and could not be shielded by one screen.
Hence, the answer is Sun–Earth L2.
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