Our Cosmic Time Machine, The James Webb Space Telescope

01The James Webb Space Telescope is really being built to answer some of the biggest questions in astronomy today.

02These are questions that almost everyone asks at some point in their life.

03Where did we come from?

04How do we get here?

05Are we alone in the universe?

06This is NASA's Curious Universe.

07Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

08I'm Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

09For 25 years, scientists and engineers from around the world have been working to design and build a revolutionary window into the early universe, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

10The James Webb Space Telescope will be the biggest and most complex telescope that NASA has ever built.

11It's a telescope that will test the boundaries of human ingenuity to find and probe some of the farthest objects and reveal new details about some closer to home.

12In late December of 1995, as kids unwrapped their holiday presents, the Hubble Space Telescope pointed towards a small region inside the Big Dipper and stared for 10 days.

13To the naked eye, it was an empty patch of sky.

14But that's not what Hubble saw.

15This little blank piece of sky was found to have thousands of galaxies in it.

16That's Eric Smith.

17He's the program scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope.

18The image he's talking about, the Hubble Deep Field, was packed with galaxies of different shapes, colors, and sizes.

19For the first time, we saw what the universe looked like almost all the way back to when it formed.

20Almost.

21Astronomers learned that none of those galaxies were the first galaxies to form.

22And they realized then that as fantastic as Hubble is, it wasn't the right instrument to detect those first galaxies.

23And so this early measurement of Hubble pointed to where its successor needed to go technically.

24The Hubble Deep Field image made scientists wonder, what if we created a telescope that could detect those baby galaxies?

25So scientists and engineers at NASA began designing a new tool that would be bigger and more sensitive, the James Webb Space Telescope.

26It will see deeper into space than we ever have before.

27And the farther we can see in space, the farther we can also see in time.

28That's because telescopes are like time machines.

29And that's not a metaphor.

30That's actually literally true.

31Amber Strawn is a project scientist for the telescope.

32That really stems from the fact that light takes time to move through the universe.

33If you look at a light bulb across the room or look at a street lamp across the street, the light from those light bulbs takes a tiny fraction of a second to travel across the room to get your eye.

34And so you're sort of seeing that light bulb as it was a tiny fraction of a second ago.

35So you can sort of think about things that are more distant.

36You know, the light from the sun takes about eight or nine minutes to get to the Earth.

37So we're seeing the sun as it was eight or nine minutes ago.

38The Webb Telescope, one of the most fundamental and most crucial things it will be able to do is look back into time and see some of the very first galaxies that were born after the Big Bang.

39That's looking at a part of space that we've never seen before.

40Looking at baby galaxies will give us an idea of how our own galaxy formed.

41And there are a few things that make Webb perfect for getting a glimpse at them.

42The first is its sensitivity.

43A lot of the things that we're trying to study are either very faint inherently or they're very, very far away.

44And so you need a really big, powerful telescope in order to see them.

45So when you factor in the size of its mirror, the amount of light it will see, and also the sort of new type of detectors that we have, the Webb Telescope will be overall about 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope.

46The Webb Telescope will have the sensitivity to be able to see the light of a bumblebee at the distance of the moon.

47Webb is so sensitive that it can see the details on a U.S.

48penny from 24 miles away.

49Another thing that makes Webb special is the kind of light that it will collect.

50It's light that our eyes aren't designed to see.

51Infrared light.

52Eric explains what that means.

53Infrared light is what we commonly think of as heat.

54So if you imagine you have a sunbeam coming through your window and you put a prism down there and you see it splits the light up into the rainbow from blue to red.

55If you were to put a thermometer to the right where that red light was, you would be registering the infrared radiation that's coming through as heat.

56You would see that thermometer going up, so you are detecting infrared radiation there.

57What Webb is going to do is be optimized to detect that heat radiation.

58But why do scientists want to capture infrared instead of visible light?

59There are two reasons for that.

60Webb wants to look at the earliest galaxies to form in the universe.

61When they formed early on, that means they've been participating in the expansion of the universe.

62And so their light, as the universe expands, gets stretched out.

63And the light that started as visible light has its wavelength stretched into the infrared.

64Even though they're emitting the light as visible, by the time it gets to us, it's infrared.

65And then the other reason is that infrared light can penetrate the clouds of dust where stars form in our own galaxy.

66Dust is great for creating things like stars.

67But it can block our view of objects in the sky that we want to observe.

68Infrared light waves go right through the dust, allowing us to see things that have been hidden.

69Webb's sensitivity also makes it a powerful tool to look at exoplanets, planets outside of our solar system that don't orbit the sun.

70The observatory will look at these planets' atmospheres in detail, even searching for signs that they could be habitable.

71I'm looking forward to, you know, a few years after Webb is flying, to be out in the night sky, pointing up there and saying, you see, you know, a little bit to the left or right of that star, there's a star that we can't quite see.

72But around it orbits a planet that could host life similar to ours.

73And that will be a pretty profound moment for humanity, I think.

74With this new telescope in town, you might be wondering, what will happen to the Hubble Space Telescope after Webb begins doing science?

75Hubble has become this world icon because of its beautiful images.

76Crisp portraits of Jupiter and its shrinking red spot?

77Blue and orange glows from the relics of supernovae?

78Or pink dust clouds where stars are being born?

79They connect with people on a deep level because they're so beautiful.

80And it just sort of, it gets to the deeper levels of us as humans, of our need to connect to something that's outside of ourselves.

81Hubble will still be very important for our exploration of the universe.

82In many instances, the telescopes can work together to get a more complete understanding of the objects in our skies.

83They'll be complementary because they're optimized for different pieces of the spectrum.

84And the best way to do science would be to combine observations of Hubble and Webb.

85Now, because Hubble's operated for 30 years, it's looked at a lot of things.

86And you can bet that what people will do early on is take Webb and go look at some of those same things to use both data sets together.

87You may have seen photos of Hubble, a silver cylinder with solar panel wings.

88Webb, however, looks completely different.

89To construct a telescope that could look beyond what Hubble can see, NASA scientists and engineers had to think outside the box, or in this case, outside the tube.

90So when you think about a telescope, you're probably imagining your sort of backyard telescope, like a tube with a mirror at the end.

91And if you think about the Hubble Space Telescope, that's what Hubble's like.

92It's like a huge tube with a mirror at the end of it up in space.

93But the James Webb Space Telescope is completely different.

94It looks like a space machine from the future.

95It's very sort of sci-fi, future space techie-looking thing.

96The telescope looks so futuristic, in fact, that it was once mistaken as a work of art.

97I can remember many years ago, we took a full-scale model of the telescope to New York City, and it was set up in Battery Park.

98A young couple came up, and they obviously looked like artists, sort of very bohemian.

99And they came up, and they wanted to know what was this beautiful sculpture that was going to be in Battery Park, and how long would it stay there?

100And so they saw Webb as an art installation, and were amazed to learn that this was actually a science instrument that people were building.

101And so I think that's what really captures a lot of people's interest in Webb, is that it's just a beautiful thing to look at.

102The model was beautiful, but the telescope itself, when built, was even more striking.

103Amber recalls taking her first peek at the telescope.

104It's just, it took my breath away.

105I mean, it was honestly a little, it was a little bit emotional.

106It sounds weird to say it, it's just this, you know, it's a telescope, it's a machine.

107But it's unlike any machine that has been built before.

108The first key thing about this telescope is it is huge.

109It is by far the biggest telescope that NASA has ever attempted to send into space.

110Top to bottom, it stands about four stories tall, and it has a gigantic kite-shaped sunshield that's about the size of a tennis court.

111The sunshield is made of five layers.

112Each aluminum-coated layer is as thin as a strand of human hair.

113The sunshield will block light and heat not only from the sun, but also from Earth and the moon.

114But the star of the show is what sits on top of the sunshield.

115It has this beautiful, iconic golden mirror that's made out of 18 separate golden hexagons.

116The golden hexagonal mirrors that adorn Webb look like a shiny honeycomb.

117But the gold isn't just about aesthetics.

118Gold is really good at reflecting infrared light, the stuff that Webb wants to observe.

119The mirrors and the sunshield will fold together for launch, and then expand like a transformer in space.

120What struck Amber most when seeing Webb is the people that had a hand in making it a reality.

121Webb represents an enormous collaboration involving NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, as well as the Space Telescope Science Institute and Northrop Grumman.

122Thousands of engineers worked on the project.

123And let's not forget the scientists at universities across the world who will use Webb for their scientific inquiries.

124It was the representation of decades of work that, you know, thousands of people have put in to bring together this awesome machine that will change fundamentally our understanding of how the universe works.

125The fact that we're going to send it to space just blows my mind.

126To get a telescope like this prepped for spaceflight, the team has had to go through a number of tests.

127Like when Webb was recently put on a vibration table.

128And this is where we shake the whole observatory with the same violence and frequencies that it will feel when it rides the Ariane 5 rocket into space.

129This test, where Webb was vibrated at a frequency of up to 100 times per second, was performed in early October 2020.

130So we've now subjected it to a simulated launch.

131Then we will undergo all the deployments that it will do in space.

132As well as electronics tests, software tests, and a test where the telescope is cooled down to the temperature it will operate at in space.

133These tests are like a dress rehearsal for when Webb is actually sent to space.

134The next step is to get it to the launch location across the Panama Canal.

135The telescope is about to go on a cruise.

136Literally, it will take a boat ride down to French Guiana.

137To a space launch facility in the city of Karu.

138The location is close to the equator, where Earth's spin is faster than anywhere else on the planet.

139That spin will give the Ariane 5 rocket a little extra push as it takes off with Webb in the fall of 2021.

140On launch day, it will be sent on a 30-day journey to a special place called a Lagrange point.

141There's a lot of math involved, but basically it's where the gravity of the Earth and the Sun combine to make a stable orbital point that follows Earth around the Sun.

142This allows an object like Webb to stay put relative to Earth.

143One of these points is located about a million miles away from Earth, about four times farther away than the Moon.

144That is where Webb will explore the universe.

145The launch is both the culmination of years of effort and the beginning of what could be decades of breakthrough scientific discoveries.

146There is a lot of anticipation.

147Thinking ahead to launch, it's hard to know what we'll all be feeling.

148I've been working on the Webb team at NASA now for, I guess, going on about 12 years, which is a long time to work on one mission.

149But, of course, there are people on the Webb team that have literally spent their whole careers on it.

150I mean, these huge telescopes, these big groundbreaking missions, people spend their entire careers on.

151People like John Mather, Nobel laureate, who has been with Webb since conception.

152In 1995, he got a call from NASA headquarters.

153We're going to start a study of this new telescope.

154Do you want to work on it?

155And I thought, I've never heard of anything so exciting before.

156I'm going to do that.

157He's been able to see the project grow from an idea to a fully assembled machine.

158When we started off in the beginning, we just had words, bigger and colder.

159That's what the committee said.

160And then we had pictures.

161We had a sketch on the big whiteboard that says, it could look like this.

162And then we have hardware.

163Now we have real people putting it all together and making sure that it works.

164So you see, all in one glance, this entire history in front of you.

165And finally, something is getting ready for launch, and there's an awful lot at stake.

166This telescope is not just for scientists.

167It's for the world.

168As Webb travels to its final destination, it slowly deploys its many complicated components bit by bit until finally it will get to work trying to answer some of those key questions Amber talked about.

169Where did we come from?

170How did we get here?

171Are we alone in the universe?

172And perhaps, questions we haven't yet thought to ask.

173For me, the most exciting thing will be when some young astronomer thinks of a different way to use this than we ever imagined, and may find something that we hadn't thought of.

174Those are the things that I think every scientist lives for.

175It's those mysteries that are out there in the universe that we haven't even dreamed of yet.

176I think the universe is going to surprise us.

177This is NASA's Curious Universe.

178This episode was written and produced by Liz Landau and Margot Wohl.

179Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.

180The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold, Michaela Sosby, and Vicki Woodburn.

181Special thanks to Laura Betts, Ryland Hegey, Natasha Pinole, Felicia Chow, and the James Webb Space Telescope team.

182If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing this episode with a friend.

183You can learn more about the Webb Telescope by visiting jwst.nasa.gov.

184Still curious about NASA?

185You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers.

186You can email a voice recording or send a written note to nasa-curiousuniverse at mail.nasa.gov.

187Go to nasa.gov slash curiousuniverse for more information.

188NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology