Countdown to the James Webb Space Telescope | Dr. Eric Smith | All Space Considered

so we are overjoyed tonight to have as our guest dr. Eric Smith who is from NASA headquarters and so Eric why don't you please come and join us so let me tell you two quick stories about Eric one is we've known each other for years because I was on Hubble he was on Hubble where Hubble cousins huffily Hubble siblings together and and then the other thing is he was supposed to come here last January and do this talk but we had that pesky little government shutdown so some of you might remember that we had to say well Eric Smith had you know they didn't let him travel so just a mere nine months later we are so glad to finally welcome you here and and so Eric why don't you tell us a little bit about web and then we'll have a chance to ask questions and discuss okay well thanks Laura and I guess the delay worked out well because now we have some really exciting news to talk about here one of the first things that I like to talk about when I talk about the James Webb Space Telescope is say well who the heck is James Webb so this is the James Webb that we're talking about here not the ex senator from Virginia but the man who was really the architect of the Apollo program NASA's second administrator but the reason it's important for us here as scientists is that he is the person that insisted science be done within NASA many of you may remember that the Apollo program was really showing American superiority to the Soviet Union we're going to beat them to the moon we have the best Rockets all that that's really all that kennedy cared about but Webb who was a bureaucrat by training knew how to work the levers of government knew that he had to have the best scientists and engineers to complete what the president wanted and to get those people he had to let them do their science and engineering research so the only reason we have science at NASA is because of James Webb who was a lawyer by training actually so why are we building the Webb Space Telescope well we're building it because of something that Hubble couldn't do after Hubble was repaired in 1993 the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute Bob Williams at the time said he was gonna do an experiment in point the Hubble at a blank piece of sky I think there were maybe four stars in the field of view otherwise completely blank to see what could you see if you really expose for a long time in the sky there and of course that picture now famous as the Hubble Deep Field then there was other instantiations of it the Hubble Ultra Deep Field SuperDuper the super duper Stella fragile mystic they field what they were looking for in these deep fields were signatures of the first stars and galaxies can we see the universe turn the lights on in other words and what they found was no matter which one of these objects they looked at it was not one of the first galaxies and so as capable and as amazing as Hubble is there are some places where it has fallen short so that actually told us now this is in the mid 90s that what we needed to do if we wanted to see some of these very first galaxies was to build a larger telescope and one that was optimized for the infrared and I'll do a brief little physics discussion about why that's the case so galaxies emit a lot of their energy as starlight which we can see in the optical and so here you see the blackbody spectrum the amount of energy that comes out as a function of wavelength peaking at around the optical part of the spectrum for a redshift of 0 object so redshift 0 means it's local in our own universe now as you're looking out in space you begin to look back in time astronomers measure that in terms of redshift and if you march out in time farther back in today's the wavelengths the light gets stretched by the expanding fabric of space/time think of if you were shaking a rope with a friend of yours and you started backing up with it you would be flattening out increasing the wavelength the same thing is happening as light travels across space-time to us it's getting shifted to the red and so if you move to a redshift of 3 you can see where that peak used to be an optical it's now in the infrared part of the spectrum if you go out to a redshift of 10 which is about where Hubble can see 2 maybe a little farther than that now you're in starting to get into the mid infrared so to find these early galaxies you would like to optimize to be an infrared telescope that's where the light is the other thing that redshift does is it decreases the surface brightness it makes the objects harder to see they've become fainter so you need an infrared optimized bigger telescope and that's really the genesis for the James Webb Space Telescope it was this phenomenon that Hubble looked for couldn't quite make it and it told told astronomer the astronomical community what the next step needed to be now one of the benefits you get of having an infrared telescope that you've built for this is that it's also going to be very capable of looking at objects of cooler temperatures again if you look at starlight stars emitting a lot of their radiation in this visible part of the spectrum that's a characteristic temperature several thousand degrees Kelvin if you have an infrared optimized telescope it's going to be more sensitive to cooler objects and so you'll see the universe in a slightly different way you'll be looking at different physics and will be most sensitive to objects in the hundreds of Kelvin range locally this is more for experiments that we would do within our own galaxy so these are the basics of the physics behind Webb now what were some of the things that astronomers were thinking about when they said hey let's build this large infrared optimized telescope well you might imagine had plenty of things they wanted to do so initially it was this emphasis on finding the first stars and galaxies but since you can see those first objects you can now watch them evolve throughout cosmic time so you can do a lot of experiments as it were about the structure and how it builds up in the universe you can begin to penetrate because infrared radiation penetrates gas and dust clouds more effectively than optical light so you can watch stars forming in dust clouds within our own galaxy the second the last question up there was something that we didn't think about when we were first conceiving web because in the early 90s does anybody know but the exoplanet count was in early 90s well it was when we were started at web there was - we knew about - around the Pulsar there was no way you could observe them with web but it really wasn't part of the initial thinking now when we talk about the instrument you'll see that we actually will be super capable but it wasn't really by design it was only because of the incredible power of some of the instruments so just for comparison here people may be more familiar with Hubble this is just a little little statistics comparison between the two so Hubble's mirror is two-and-a-half about two and a half meters in diameter web is six and a half meters in diameter so more collecting area Hubble is pretty beefy as far as telescopes go it got to ride up on the shuttle so they didn't really have to worry about mass saving mass that much we had to worry about that a lot we were just the bigger observatory so even though we are a larger collecting area we're about half the mass of Hubble our wavelength coverage is from the reddest parts of where your eye can see out to the mid-infrared whereas Hubble can see a little bit into the infrared out to the ultraviolet so different wavelengths optimization Hubble's a room-temperature telescope because it's in low-earth orbit because we're infrared optimized we want to be cold because you don't want to see the signal coming from your tell scopes Oh our telescope is very cold and also unlike Hubble we will be far away Hubble was accessible by the shuttle got repaired we're gonna go a million miles away 1.5 million kilometers away and we'll talk more about that later let's see Oh last point there Hubble went up on the shuttle and because we're a partnership with the European Space Agency they are giving us a ride on their Ariane 5 rocket so a little bit about the telescope here Wireless little animation runs we talked about three big components of at the telescope itself the gold hexagonal structure everybody thinks of the spacecraft element which includes that sun shield and also houses the propellant and avionics and batteries and things like that and then behind it those white structures you see there are the science instruments and we have four of them in the order they're listed there the mid-infrared instrument is the one that sees the longest wavelengths for us it was built by a collaboration of European countries and has contributions from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory they did the detectors and the cooling for it the near infrared spectrograph is was given to us by the European Space Agency the big US instrument is the near-infrared camera that was built by dr. Marsha Ricci at the University of Arizona working with Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto and then the last bit there the fine guidance sensor and near infrared imager and slit with spectrograph is the Canadian Space Agency contribution and so they have a functional part the fine guidance sensor which keeps us locked on targets I'd like to say Canada is helping their unruly neighbor to the South stay focused in there and then the near infrared imager and slit with spectrograph is their science instrument so we knew we needed cameras and spectrographs we needed a big telescope that looks a little bit different we could talk more about that later but to realize those things we had to make a bunch of inventions we had to invent technologies that actually enabled it I won't go through all of them here but some of the most amazing ones I do have pictures of later on the backplane the superstructure behind the mirror the mirrors themselves which are beryllium we made them out of beryllium mined in Utah throw away 95% of the mass so really all you have is a millimeter or two of beryllium sheet whose only job is to carry a thousand atoms thick of gold to do the infrared reflectivity so all that structure is there to carry a thousand atoms of gold to reflect the infrared light so speaking of the science instruments that's just the these were the things in white and that animation in the upper left corner is the near-infrared camera this will be the main the workhorse camera you'll see a lot of pictures from it's actually a redundant instrument it's got a top and a bottom half they're identical and that's because this is also the instrument we will use to make all those mirrors work like one and so it's completely redundant should one camera fail we could use the other one and that way keep all the other instruments able to work and you wouldn't lose their functionality the upper right is the near infrared spectrograph that's the European Space Agency instrument for scale because there isn't a person in the picture there that's about the size of a baby grand piano that optical bench there it has a micro shutter device inside it that was built at the Goddard Space Flight Center and that's about you know a hundred thousand or so little shutters that are about the width of a human hair that you can open and close so you can isolate particular objects on the sky and let their light into your spectrograph it's the first time we'll fly something like that in space bottom that's incredible it's it is an amazing instrument and I think it's the one that astronomers will it will really be a workhorse but I know it's gonna be one of those things it's gonna be more complicated than everyone thinks when they first started like oh yeah I can do that and then they start working on it's gonna take a little longer the mid-infrared instrument bottom left it's both the camera in a spectrograph there it's being assembly actually at the University of Edinburgh was where they had been putting some of that together and then the bottom right is right before was shipped that's the Canadian fine guidance near infrared imagers little spectrograph so all four of those instruments got put now looking at the left hand side here into this cage we called it an integrated science instrument module and that was lowered into the telescope structure and on that picture you can see the goal of the telescope it's pointing down at the floor this is out at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland and then the picture on the right is just the very end of that process where they've lowered it into the Isum compartment then once that was all together they we needed to test the telescope and the instruments together so first a little bit about how that telescope works we're called a three mirror and a stigma design so we have three main mirrors elliptical a hyperbolic and another elliptical tertiary mirror but there's also a flat steering mirror at the end that we can use so we don't have to slew the telescope for small motions we can just move that mirror a little bit the mirrors as I may have mentioned were made of beryllium each mirror segment can be controlled in piston tip and tilt and we can also adjust its radius of curvature so even though they look flat to the eye there is some optical power in them and you can sort of push the center in and out we know that when we launch this it will be out of focus just just giving you that but we can adjust it and in fact because it's a this infrared telescope that has to work extremely cold temperatures the mirrors now are they're out of focus because they're at room temperature and it only comes into focus when it's extremely cold it's part of the reason why it takes us so long from when we launched when we get data back we have to cool down so that the mirrors are smooth as were supposed to be at cold and not bumpy as they are at room temperature so did we test that well of course we tested that we took it down to the Johnson Space Center where there we refurbished the old thermal vacuum chamber that the Apollo mission used to test the Apollo spacecraft they used it to heat the spacecraft so they could test the effects of moving the spacecraft and how that might affect the astronauts and of course we wanted to be just the opposite we made it a cryo chamber so that we could drive things very cold it's interesting when you go down there to work on the side of the chamber it's a National Historic Register facility so I thought that was kind of cool that we're you know doing modern-day technology in this historic structure and and they didn't make us wear skinny black ties and that was good we didn't have to go to all that trouble but this was after we did the test and sure enough they were able to move all those mirrors and exercise all the instruments and I'm delighted to say that it will meet the scientific promise it has once we get it on orbit everything worked as planned so that was very exciting the structure that lies behind that telescope even though we're just carrying those thousand atoms of gold up there thousand atoms thick of gold it's this backplane this structure made of a carbon composite material comes in thin sheets that they lay up and epoxy together it's incredibly strong it's very light and it has the property of a lot of things on Web you its behavior as it changes temperature is very well calibrated and you can see the little node up there about how precise it has to be we have to know how this is going to change to a fraction of a human hair because that will affect the image we get back on the telescope in fact we were able to see when we were testing it down to the Johnson Space Center there was a camera at the top of that chamber they would shine down and that chamber wasn't as cold in the top as the rest of the chamber and just that very slight exposure to a few degrees temperature caused some of the insulating material to feel a change in temperature and that incredibly tiny stress could be seen through the backplane so it carries that information to the optics and we have to be able to correct that out and they were able to so the other characteristic thing other than those gold hexagons is the big Sun shield for Webb it's our parasol that we use to block infrared light most telescopes block the stray light with the tube we are a naked telescope we don't have a tube that's because we have most of the sources of infrared light to one side of us we'll see that in an animation later but by keeping the Sun the earth and the moon more or less on one side we only need to protect ourself on that one side from this the infrared radiation being a fair skinned person I love that last little thing there SPF of a million and I could use that now the the spacecraft element which is both the Sun shield here we see it all folded up in its launch configuration and then the spacecraft bus which is essentially it's the infrastructure that enables the whole Observatory to work it's where we have our reaction wheels our gyroscopes our fuel tanks the batteries the electronics they had completed their environmental testing so we subjected them to the vibration of a launch of an Ariane 5 the sound from the Ariane 5 and the thermal stresses they will feel which are different than the telescope this part only sees more or less room temperature it sees the Sun all the time the telescope never sees it and it's in fact that great contrast in temperature that means we can never test the whole thing in a thermal vacuum chamber on earth there no chamber big enough that would let you get the heat on one side and the cold on the other side and not be an infinitely large chamber that's it's what we have space for so two weeks ago today as Laura mentioned it all came together finally and if you were to take a trip just a couple miles south of LAX Airport at the Northrop Grumman Redondo Beach facility if you know anybody who works there make sure you get them to go to the observation room anybody can get in there if they work at Northrop their badge will let them into the observation deck and you can go see it yourself down there anyone from Northrop in the audience you need oh great I've got a hundred new friends okay everybody there you go yeah now before we talk a little bit about some of the science that we suspect they're gonna do well I'll take you know time out for this is a paid commercial break here about the people who've made this all happen so there's a lot of words up on the slide here but this is an international endeavor large great observatories like Laura mentioned are pretty much all built with international support these days and so it's I think Spitzer may be the last such Observatory that will ever be built just by one country there are all future missions are all international partnerships the lead for this was the Goddard Space Flight Center but we had contributions from almost every other NASA Center ISA supplied us with an instrument and the ride the Ariane 5 which is the world's most successful reliable rocket of its class now so that's very comforting to know you have a nice safe ride Canada supplied that fine guidance sensor both ISA and Canada are supplying people to work at Space Telescope Science Institute so they'll be scientists on staff there and then the main industrial contractor was Northrop Grumman and they worked with Ball Aerospace and many other companies to make this come together and of course like Hubble this will be the science program will be run by the Space Telescope Science Institute but they will also fly the bird as they say this one so it will actually be operated from Baltimore where STScI is Hubble was run out of Goddard so speaking of where things were built this is just a chart we show from all the companies across the u.s. that had some say or they contributed to web and we like to take this around with us if we're traveling to any place in the country to try to you know mention if there's anybody nearby of course here in Los Angeles you have north of Bremen nearby but there are other companies in the area one last bit on the commercial some people like to talk about NASA spin-offs I view that they're valuable they're a side benefit you don't do these things to get spin-offs there would be cheaper ways to get them but it is nice to know that these incredible mirrors we had to make an invent have allowed another company to use the metrology technology to make something that I doctors can use now for improved LASIK measurements we're using a lot of the other metrology techniques for a higher tech business in what I consider an amazing piece of future heritage the application specific circuits we had to invent were invented early enough in the program that they actually got to use one on the last sub servicing mission for Hubble so we invented something and sort of gave it to our predecessor that was pretty interesting and then the detectors we had to build have become the foundation for missions after us and will be for future missions as well so we're all together we're down at Northrop we have about one year of testing to go they'll practice a deployment we'll see that in a second then they'll fold everything back up and then they'll take the whole observatory in that configuration you saw before where it was folded up and they'll again shake it like it's gonna go in an area and they'll blast it with the sound of an Ariane and then they'll unfold it all again and fold it back up so in about a year it'll be ready for its launch and that means we'll take a boat ride we are going to take a ship from Los Angeles through the Panama Canal down to French Guiana where it will be launched by the European Space Agency it sounds counterintuitive but that's actually how Ariane spots the primary contractor get there large parts down there too they barge them in I'd like to say it's and that's an easier route they're very close to the coast and the the rest of the country's infrastructure isn't as good for things like large bridges taking a lot of stress so we will take a ride a boat ride down there now I mentioned that we're gonna be a million and a half kilometers away anytime you have two bodies that orbit one another this a two-body system will have five places that are stable or semi stable in the gravity field of this rotating system this was discovered by a French mathematician in the 19th century LeGrande where we are going is that l2 point and so it sits outside the earth and the Sun and if we run this little animation what we actually do here you see the moon whipping around the earth there and you'll see Webb come in and we actually orbit about that second LaGrant so we keep the Sun shield it keeps the Sun the earth and the moon on one side of us we're not in the shadow of the moon because we got to be able to communicate back to the earth but the size of the sun shield means that we can keep those things on the hot side and keep the cold side on the cold side so now now the part that give everyone gets it caused to cause their heart to skip a beat this is how we get out there is an animation that folks at Northrop Grumman put together showing the sequence of events once we get released by the upper stage from the ariane we go through a series of maneuvers and deployments you can see on the top the time after launch the distance will come up with the activity and you can see a little graph showing where we are in our journey [Music] santé the solar array comes out very quickly so we have power [Music] we start to do any course corrections we need to to make sure we're going to the right orbit out there at l2 the smaller the correction we have to make the longer our life is because it saves fuel [Music] right about the time we get close to the moon our high gain antenna comes out so we can communicate at a high data rate we see about two days we're past the moon [Music] now we begin the major deployments where what's called a pallet that holds the sunshield the forward part folds down we'll follow that by folding the back part down I got to watch them test this at North to Roman they do a gravity offload to test the system now once those are down we want to move the telescope away from the spacecraft because it is a little warm itself so we telescope up on a tower about five feet now the covers that protected the sun shield during launch are released and they roll back some covers in near the spacecraft core do the same thing and once those are released we can actually begin to push out concentric tube telescope booms to extend the sunshield there are five layers to this Sun shield and it's critical that there be separation in these layers so that heat from one layer can escape out before it hits the next so they'll tension up the system which is just a pulley system that brings raises the layers apart and provides tension to them [Music] the next deployment is as a flap in the back that you can think of as a sail because it's there to balance the solar photon pressure that would tip the telescope over if that were not there to balance the center of pressure and the center of mass aren't exactly the same that's ridiculously cool that's the cryo cooler starting for that mid-infrared instruments a little refrigerator to keep it super cold and here after you know about ten days or so the secondary mirror comes out and it's at this point when light can actually stay focused light can get into the science instruments another raid there are a lot of radiators that get deployed during this sequence and then we bring drop leaf tables to style the two wings come out so after about two weeks the major let's call them visible deployments are done but then the mirrors themselves are held down to that backplane structure for launch they get released and we begin to start moving those as they're cooling down and begin to bring them into shape it takes about a month for us to get out to l2 we're cooling down this whole time starting to commission the instruments we're a little bit like a planetary mission in that will launch fire and smoke a lot of activity the first data don't come out until six months after that so we went after the launch if you don't hear anything for six months it's okay what well we actually that's a big activity we have now is how do we bring along you know the public the taxpayer with all the activities that are going on even though we're not seeing data yet well those first two weeks will we be able to follow along live with each and every deployment yes that's gonna be a big part of again bringing people along for the ride is we have social media accounts describing you know this is what's going to happen today and you know here's how we know that that happens we don't have any pictures and there's nothing that we'll be taking a picture of us while we're out there but we'll have you know great computer simulations showing the state of the spacecraft so once we get out there what in fact will Webb do so we know already that it will be looking for these first galaxies and here you see an enormous simulation of the universe with dark matter in the purple where a visible matter is accreting at the dark matter centers and galaxies are beginning to form this is the reason we built web we know this is the science it's going to be able to return for us so that's certainly exciting the other thing that has become I think maybe even more exciting for a lot of people is this notion of exoplanets as I mentioned when we first conceived web we didn't think we were gonna be doing exoplanets because we only knew of two well now we know of thousands and the way web will really contribute is in the cases where you have a transiting exoplanet an exoplanet that goes between us and the star and we will look to see if that planet has an atmosphere that subtracts certain elements of star light from it so we are really going to be looking for habitable atmospheres with web it's got the mirror size needed to do this it will still be challenging for web but it will be the first telescope that you'll really be able to go after this in a very big way and so this is something that we already know is going to be a big focus for web even though when we built it it wasn't conceived that we would be doing that the infrared capabilities of web will allow us to peer inside the birthplaces of stars and planets within our own galaxy and we already have seen there are programs I'll talk a bit about more of those in a second where people are going to be doing just this so another way to watch star birth in our own galaxy even though it's a big telescope designed to look at the distant universe it will be able to do amazing things within our own solar system now because of the configuration we can't look at the inner solar system so we can't look at Venus we can't look at mercury can't look at the Earth's we can look at Mars you can do whether global weather on Mars by looking at it with web I really think most of the time will be spent on looking at the large moons in the outer solar system and the trans-neptunian or Kuiper belt objects and with the infrared capabilities it's a great thing to study those a lot of words up here the main thing is the link at the bottom we already know some of the first things web is going to look at and these are the so-called early release science programs these were competitively selected and they range from distant universe observations to looking at bodies within our own solar system here so already the community knows what they want to do for the first things that Webb is going to look at and if you want to follow along like every person and or spacecraft these days it has a Facebook page Twitter account and is it gonna talk in the first person like oh I stretched my wings actually a bunch of a bunch of us don't want it to do it sure is cold out here yeah they won't be from me I'll tell you that the the top link there is the main one and NASA has a lot of you can get to a lot of hardware images and movies and whatnot and the one below at the Webb telescope org is the one that the Space Telescope Science Institute runs and that's going to be focused more on the science that comes out so that's a little bit it doesn't have as much on it right now because we haven't done any observations yet but I'm looking forward to the launch in March of 2021 six months after that the amazing science will start coming out and so you know keep on the lookout for those and I would be happy to take any questions you have about well one two three and then I'm gonna look to that hands up so we're gonna take these three stabilize it and is there gonna be a possibility of if everything doesn't work right to have a servicing a million and a half miles and will long wait about a man service okay so I'll repeat the question back does it have gyroscopes how does it stabilize and one that a lot of folks ask is Webb serviceable so it does have gyroscopes and reaction wheels we use the reaction wheels to point the telescope by using the conservation of angular momentum we have six wheels you'd need three of them at a time they're all at slightly different angles and by spinning them at different rates and changing that spin rate you can move your telescope so that's how we'll move about the sky and then eventually those wheels can become what's called saturated they spin up too fast and you need to de spin them and you do that by pushing against rocket thrust so we have thrusters that we that we would push against the reaction wheel and that gives us our life limiting feature which is fuel to desaturate the wheels we're going to carry up enough fuel for about ten years of operations if we get a good injection meaning we don't have to burn any to correct our orbit we'll get more and I suspect as people at the Institute learn how to construct an observing program that builds up this momentum in a very small way maybe get more time second question about servicing because we're going a million and a half miles away we have no way of sending people there today or even in the web lifetime so serviceability was not something we built in to the design in fact our instruments are distributed in the sense that you can't just go in and take that NIR cam out because the electronics are in a different place what we have done is placed optical targets on the bottom of the spacecraft in the ring that attaches to the rocket and so in the future if there's some advanced robotic thing that could go up there and latch on to that it could possibly refuel that's about the only thing you could do for web if there's a flaw it's so distributed you couldn't repair one of the reasons web is so expensive is that we've had to have a very elaborate detailed lengthy test program to make sure we have redundancy and multiple ways to do things so there are no failures on orbit the micro shutters yes they I assume those are for occultation well it's the image focused on one things you write will use those primarily when we want to take a spectra of lots of galaxies in a in a field but we don't want spectra of stars that happen to be in the field or interesting or uninteresting nearby galaxies so we'll keep those parts of the sky blocked out and we'll just let light in from the things we want to see another place where we might use those is in say like a cluster of stars where there's a few hundred stars in that cluster we only want the spectra from those and not the background stars so we just let the light in from the objects we're interested in there there are you can move it into the field of view that same instrument has a more traditional just a long slit spectrograph one a single slit and it has an integral field unit so you could move your small objects into those fields otherwise you just open or close the shutters you need thank you for a great talk and I have a white don't Chuck okay why don't you offer a ride to some University to build a CubeSat for the purpose of observing the telescope as it deploys and so one of the things I did over the past year was look at that very possibility and it's actually dangerous so the way if you wanted to observe that telescope the way to do it would have been to build cameras right into the thing itself most spacecraft don't do that so now after the fact we looked at you know could you take things on the Ariane 5 with you to go first off arjan would say no you know we respect out for this and you then have the you'd have to worry about control of your CubeSat a few hundred thousand dollars ten billion dollar observatory don't don't want any of that so in the end we even looked at well what about a large telescope what if you built say for the lunar program another Hubble and you you sent that a day or so later and then afterwards you know it went back to the moon that did something there then you ran into the problem of the launch window constraints get so tight if if somebody has a problem then then you miss it and you now you can't catch it so you'd have to get a cube set the other thing we'd have to get pretty close because the telescope's on a CubeSat are gonna be only you know this this big and so to make it an interesting image you'd have to get close enough that it people worried about collisions anyone on this side of the room yes I I don't know much about telescopes or space technology but do you know if machine learning was used for any major or minor design choices and what my knowledge machine learning was not used in any of the design aspects much of this design work was done in the early 2000s before a lot of the machine learning was a I think applied in many industries I think what we're trying to do now is use it more in designing observing programs and mining data for web and that's where I expect it will make a big difference there so I have a question and then lastly but I'll go before you because I see what do you want to observe yourself and are they giving you time just because of all the years you've put in I guess that's part to act so one of the things when you work for NASA and particularly NASA headquarters you're there to create science programs for the science community so we don't get any time NASA and and I think that's actually good because we can actually do things very objectively if if my goal was to observe object X it might influence my decisions as to how they optimize that estimate or that so so we do things for the best of the science community if I were gonna pick something to look at I would probably one of the galaxies in my thesis was NGC 1275 radio galaxy active galaxy I would probably look at that to see about how the star formation in the inner region relates to any of the activity at the center or is it a remnant of the collision that could spawn the system thank you but I'd have to write a proposal and their last okay two questions you and then you and then I'm done my question was what were you were most excited to learn about from Webb well that would have been if I was doing my old science again I I think the the most interesting thing that I know it's going to do is probably some of these exoplanets looking for habitability the Trappist system but as I was saying a little earlier usually the best or the most fascinating science that comes from these great observatories there's something we don't even think about today so somebody is gonna think of some novel use that people will initially say well that's a stupid idea it's not going to work you can't do it and eventually it will be an amazing discovery so that's what I'm looking forward to [Music] is anything special but l2 is that any noteworthy is it going to be a subject of research for the telethon is it anything like that healthy that's it so l2 is a special place because it's a semi stable point so you don't need a lot of fuel to stay there it's just a point in space there's nothing there because it's semi stable if you put something there any any perturbations to it a little pressure you know hit hit by something it will fall off l2 l4 and l5 those points are stable and in fact if you look their collections of dust exist in those places but we go to l2 because it's far away from infrared sources for us it's semi-stable so we don't need to use a lot of fuel to stay there and in fact a lot of science missions I've already gone there and future ones are gonna go there so but it's a big place so it won't get crowded okay I'm gonna call it into the questions sadly cuz I know everybody has a few more but we have a few things we just want to share before we go to our break so let's think and we made this this poster for the talk tonight before seeing you today so one of our staff Jeff here updated it a little bit there as we said we would you

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Keywords: Griffith, Observatory, All Space Considered, Astronomy, Science, News, New research, Planet, astrophysics, live science program, Astronomy lecture, presentation, space, outer space, space exploration, NASA, Griffith Observatory, Eric, Smith, Eric Smith, Scientist, James Webb Space Telescope, James, Webb, Space, Telescope, JWST, Program, Universe, Early, Stars, Planets, Exoplanets, Exoplanet, Star, Galaxy

Id: M6y919Q24kw

Length: 47min 45sec (2865 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/wdwerker]

Pretty sure it’s a one shot mission, no chance of refueling or repairs due to the distance. Cooling system should last longer than other chilled spacecraft have if all goes right.

[u/alllie]

From /r/LDQ