We have some bad news: Maryland’s time with NASA’s newest universe-probing telescope is almost up.

More positively (and less selfishly), we should celebrate that the Webb Telescope is one step closer to its planned 2018 launch. NASA announced today that the tennis-court sized observatory has passed the agency’s rigorous environmental tests that simulated a real-life rocket launch at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The device will soon head to Johnson Space Center in Houston for subsequent “end-to-end optical testing in a vacuum at its extremely cold operating temperatures,” the agency said. That means they’ll put the telescope in a vacuum-like, cryogenic environment much like space to see how it holds up.

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