Is Astronomy Ready for the James Webb Space Telescope?

well good evening I can now introduce myself I am David Dvorkin curator of astronomy here at the Air and Space Museum and on behalf of Christopher Brown our acting director and if I might presume on behalf of Ellen stofan who will become our new director at the end of the month I want to welcome you tonight to the second installment of our 2018 exploring space lecture series we're delighted to have dr. Ken Sembach with us as our invited speaker tonight our program this year as it has in past years is sponsored by United Launch Alliance and by Aerojet Rocketdyne this partnership making our exploring space lecture series possible over the past years is especially gratifying to me as it exemplifies what is best about the collaborative spirit of the American aerospace industry tonight we have representing Aerojet Susan Nelson in the audience and I mean I must say we had just a delightful chance to chat about the future of things in space over a little dinner our lecture tonight is dr. Kenneth Sembach he is the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute based on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore now the Space Telescope Science Institute is abbreviated stsci and I'll say that very fast but I want you to remember that it's known far and wide it is the National facility it is a National Observatory that coordinates and oversees the science done with the Hubble Space Telescope now if that wasn't enough for his institution STScI will also now be the coordinating body managing the science done with the James Webb Space Telescope after it launches given these vast responsibilities it's especially fitting that dr. sim Bach asks tonight the question tonight is astronomy ready for the James Webb Space Telescope this is the sort of thing that historians have been asking about new instrumentation for centuries and I must say I'm fascinated with what we'll learn tonight ken-san Bach is exquisitely well qualified to ask that question and also to answer it he received a BA in physics with honors in 1988 from the University of Chicago and a PhD in astronomy in 1992 from the University of wisconsin-madison one of the most productive centers for space astronomy in the United States from there he was named a NASA Hubble fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then from there moved to Johns Hopkins to become the deputy project scientist for NASA's far ultraviolet spectroscopic Explorer and we called it in the warm up it with that's fuse the far ultraviolet spectrum you know they employ people to come up with these acronyms he was responsible for managing some of its most demanding programs and it certainly it was a very creative explorer of the ultraviolet universe he's been at johns hopkins ever since joining STScI to take on a wide range of responsibilities ranging from the scientific the operational and the magic managerial aspects of making Hubble work right becoming its director in 2015 dr. Sam Bach has contributed well over a hundred and seventy-five scientific papers in broad areas of modern astrophysics becoming the recipient of many of astronomy's most visible awards and prizes he is no doubt destined for more he has made critical contributions to better understanding the physical properties of the material that lurks between the stars and between the galaxies he studied how galaxies collide with this intervening material primordial material if you like and from these interactions has come to better understand how the chemical elements in the universe developed over cosmic time he enjoys assembling and working with teams of talented people each of course universe is under themselves colliding to exceed to achieve extraordinary results as well as being an inspiration to young people to become engaged in science technology engineering arts and mathematics now the question I have in my mind is are we ready for Ken's sandbox thank you for that kind introduction David and it's nice to see so many of you in the audience tonight as I was thinking about this talk I reflected back a lot on what I was doing at he and the earlier time in my life and we kind of got into that a little bit in the question and answer session so I'm gonna take you on a little bit of tour a bit of a tour of some of the things that influenced me and see if we can actually answer that question is astronomy ready for the James Webb Space Telescope and I will just say this is a big screen so hold on to your seats all right so this is not the James Webb Space Telescope this is the hubble space telescope orbiting 350 miles above the earth and we're all familiar with Hubble and we put telescopes above the earth above the atmosphere because the atmosphere blurs images when we take them with telescopes on the ground but when we take them with Hubble they're much clearer much sharper we don't have to see through that atmosphere and in fact we can zoom in on regions of the universe that we couldn't see so clearly before and this little it this little slideshow here is just showing you one such region that Hubble's looked at and you look at all the stars in that image that's a cluster of stars you can what do you see about when you look into that what do you see you see the stars are different colors there are red stars which are cooler and older there are blue stars which are hotter and younger so you know the colors and the ages and the temperatures of the stars are related those smaller stars that you see the little dots those are stars like the Sun like our star so suddenly you realize we're not so special that in fact there are lots of stars out there that we can see and Hubble really shows us that now when I was young boy when I had that field guide that I talked about I went out and I looked for things in the sky and I could find my way around the sky but I had to pick up a book like this to actually learn about what was in it this is a one of the books that I had checked out from the library this is actually a slightly newer version this one is in the mid-1970s the version I took out was in from the 60s but in that book there are these color plates only a few pages out of the 500 pages in this book but I was amazed at these pictures pictures like you see on the screen here these were these were the universe for me these were what I should be seeing now we know that today it's possible to produce images that are more colorful than a single color and just like we're in the book I just showed you and when you zoom in on these images you see that in fact it's like we just saw there are millions of stars and this image is about a hundred thousand stars wasn't just stars though it was planets I grew up in the the heyday of the Space Age the early parts of the Space Age when we were sending Rockets up with experiments not just to study the moon but to study the planets in the solar system here are a couple of images from that book taken by the Pioneer 11 spacecraft it flew by both Jupiter and Saturn these were the best images we had of these planets at the time here's what they look like with Hubble this is another reason for being in space something that you see here that you don't see every day you see the aurora on these two giant planets these are like the Northern Lights for the Southern Lights for these planets and you see those an ultraviolet light light that doesn't penetrate the atmosphere so not only do we want to get above the blurring effects of the atmosphere you want to see wavelengths of light that you can't actually see from the ground and as spectacular as these images are there are nothing come to some of the images that we're getting back from spacecraft like Juno this is Jupiter seen by Juno you look at this image it's mind-boggling the level of detail that's in it all of the weather that's going on in the outer layers of this giant planet or you look at the images of Saturn taken by the Cassini mission when it flew by before it plunged into the planet last year and the Rings the fine rings that you can't resolve from the ground and even Hubble can't resolve all of them and then this image one of the most amazing images I think I've ever seen an image that captures all of humanity in just a few pixels everything that we've ever known ever done all civilization right there looking back again kind of makes you feel small don't worry I've got more of that coming that's just warm-up we're just in the solar system this is just 900 million miles away we're gonna go halfway across the universe here tonight folks but know that think about this the the engineering feat that has to occur in order for us to even think about obtaining an image like that these kinds of things I didn't have when I was a kid you know I had the things in the book and I had the stars in the sky these were my pale blue dots my blue marbles up in the sky I lived on the south side of Chicago I didn't have many dots in the sky but the bright ones I could see and I could find my way around and when I would do that I would then want to know what you know what else is there and so I turned to the pages of those books and I fell in love with the images especially the gas and dust images the places where stars are forming this is an image of the horsehead nebula in Orion in that book and it's up here in the constellation Orion many of you have probably seen this constellation in the winter sky at night you zoom in on it sorry if I'm making you dizzy I'm getting a little wobbly up here too and then you realize actually there's more to see than that because when you start to look at it and light that's just red word of what di can see in the infrared and Hubble has a little bit of infrared light capability you see that in fact the universe is very dark and in fact these kinds of images are very beautiful and ethereal and full of information that the book didn't have or that we didn't have from ground-based optical data or even Hubble optical data this is a horse in a whole new light just a bewdley it's galaxies millions of stars perhaps a hundred billion stars in a galaxy like this if we could look at our own from the outside it be a pinwheel shaped galaxy like this the Whirlpool Galaxy and every one of these little red blobs that you see in here is a blob like that Horsehead Nebula where stars are forming stars maybe like our own Sun are forming and you see all of the detail in this galaxy the dust and the gas and the spiral arms the red regions lit up here in hydrogen light the light of neutral hydrogen where you see the light being emanated by new stars being formed and down deep in the center of that galaxy where you can't even resolve all of the stars how many of you have seen this image right Eagle Nebula the pillars of creation it's one of the iconic Hubble images little did I know 40 years ago 45 years ago that that image was sitting at looking at right at me in the book does everybody see it on the left hand side there there it is it was in the image that I liked probably the most in that book never realizing what was really in there Hubble image that's a recent Hubble image taken just after the last servicing mission in 2009 and you can see again in all that detail we call it the pillars of creation because they're probably stars forming in there and when you look at that image you realize there's so much more detail there than you had before but we're missing part of the story because when you look at that with infrared light you see right through it and you see deeper into it and again you see it in a different way there's so much more to learn when you have the ability to see these regions and both the optical and the infrared light in this case you see right through some of this nebula and see the stars in the universe behind it in other cases you can see right down into those regions where the stars are forming and these aren't these aren't unique Hubble produces images like this all the time they're in schools they're in museums they're in this museum if you walk out into the hallway you'll see some of these same images out there whether it's stars in star forming regions or stars and their death throes stars that are shutting off their outer layers or interacting with their surrounding medium when they've exploded galaxies big aggregations of stars maybe a hundred billion stars in a galaxy maybe more in some cases pinwheel type galaxies like our own others that are interacting and colliding with each other evolving as the universe goes on in time sometimes being ripped apart other times forming even more stars as they clust call us together in a violent collision under the influences of gravity and you realize then too that the universe is extremely large and that there are galaxies everywhere you look there are great groupings of galaxies called clusters and clusters of clusters called super clusters and so forth and those galaxies don't all look the same some look as if they're being torn apart like this one down in the lower left-hand corner that's actually an optical trick that the universe is playing on us there's so much mass in that cluster of galaxies that is distorting that light that we're seeing it's actually warping the space and as the light from that galaxy passes to us that's actually multiple images of that galaxy coming to us off because of that warping of the light and galaxies don't look the same everywhere when you look further back in time they look fuzzier and blob you're and less structured they look smaller and of course they look redder we'll get to that in just a moment so here's one of the other iconic images how many of you seen this image right this is one of the most famous Hubble images as well it's hanging on the wall of my office on the wall of a lot of offices here in Washington DC it's fantastic image it's a mind-boggling image there are only two stars that you can see in that image everything else is galaxies or collections of stars the two stars are the ones with the the cross like spikes there's one down here and there's one in the upper left-hand corner there everything else you see 10,000 galaxies in that image 10,000 in a piece of the sky that's no bigger than if you called a drinking straw up to your eye and you looked at it through the drinking straw compared to the size of the full moon it's small what does that tell you it tells you there's probably 200 billion galaxies in the universe and we now know from what we don't see in that image that there might be as many as 10 times more than that two trillion galaxies in the universe it's only a small piece of this guy there's 12 or 13 more million pieces of the sky just like that and you think about that that's a lot of stars 200 billion trillion right let's say the odds of a star of a star having a planet like the earth is one in a billion still means there's 200 trillion of them out there we're not alone we're not alone we may not have communicated yet but we're not alone so this deep field why is it such an iconic image well not just because it has so many galaxies but because it shaped the way we think about the universe we realized that galaxies change with time you're moving through this image and in fact you're moving back in time each slice going through it is a slice in time we know where all those galaxies are so we can place them back in time and as you move through this image you realize that the galaxies you're seeing they're changing they're getting smaller some of them are getting redder there are fewer of them fewer and fewer and fewer the question naturally becomes does the universe run out of galaxies what's happened here what's beyond what Hubble can see is there anything beyond what Hubble can see and we need a different kind of telescope to see the infrared light of those first galaxies the galaxies that are beyond Hubble's vision and why do I say you need an infrared telescope to see that well it turns out that the universe is expanding and light emitted by a galaxy leaves that galaxy one color and it arrives and we see it a redder color it's because the light itself is stretched as the universe expands so as a fabric of space stretches the light itself becomes redder distant objects move away from us faster than nearby objects and as a result they appear redder than near by objects this is called Hubble's law not because of the telescope but because of Edwin Hubble astronomer in the early 20th century who first plotted this relationship between the recession velocity of the galaxy and its distance so things that are moving away faster are more distant and therefore more redshifted they appear redder now electromagnetic spectrum Hubble sees light like we do with our eyes visible light it also sees a little bit of ultraviolet light and a little bit of infrared light but even the mighty Hubble can't see what's beyond the Hubble Deep Field that light might have started off as optical light or even ultraviolet light but it's been shifted by the expansion of the universe into a region of the infrared spectrum that it can no longer see we think of infrared light as heat you feel it as heat when you stand out in the Sun here are some images of a train and a cat taking an infrared camera light and you can see it things look different when you depict them in infrared light but what you're seeing there is a heat map and so that's effectively what we're looking for we're looking for that early light that now appears as infrared light or heat from the early universe and this is the telescope or more appropriately this is a model of the telescope a full-scale model that was on the grounds of the goddard space flight center of the James Webb Space Telescope and you can see that's not an ordinary looking telescope first off it's bigger than Hubble how many of you seen Hubble out in the gallery here yeah everybody right it's much bigger than Hubble in public self is the size of a school bus so its primary mirror it's bigger and that primary mirror is actually 18 segmented mirrors hexagonal segments put together to form one big mirror and there's another structure called Sun shield that keeps the sun's rays and the moon and the earth light off of that telescope remember this is a heat sensing telescope and you don't want any sunlight or earthly or moonlight shining on those mirrors because they exhibit heat and you don't want heat from the telescope you don't you don't want the telescope to be warm what that telescope to be cold a couple hundred degrees below zero when it's out in space that telescope has a couple of interesting features one is that segmented mirror light comes in it's off of the primary mirror the segment's up to the secondary and then back through the middle of the primary into an instrument package where the light gets analyzed by a set of instruments cameras spectrographs coronagraphs advanced instrumentation that can break the light into its component colors that can allow us to see faint things in the vicinity of bright things and so forth produce images like we've seen with Hubble this sun shield 5 layers very thin mylar like film protects the telescope from that earth and sun and moon light and then oops and then solar panels underneath obviously on the Sun side now how do you actually put a telescope that size in space well the reason it's the funny shape it is and the reason it's segmented Mirta primary is because you need to fold it up and when you put it into a rocket it looks like it does in this configuration and so here's an import video of that telescope unfolding and the and the shield deploying once it's up in space and so you get the five layers and they get pulled out and then tensioned and as that happens the whole telescope is cooling down very rapidly you've got to put the secondary and the primary mirror wings into place before everything freezes and eventually this is what it looks like it's gonna be located about a million miles from the earth at a point in space called the second Lagrange point this is a semi stable point in space around which it'll orbit it's kind of a space where the gravitational influence of the earth and the Sun balanced so that things at that location stay more or less in that location now you say okay that's great Ken but there are 18 mirrors that's not one mirror well you're right and in fact what you have when you first look at light with that telescope is 18 fuzzy blobs in the upper left there and our job will be to make sure that we take those fuzzy blobs and focus them and then align them into 18 individual images and then phase that light so that it becomes a single image and those 18 segments act as a single primary mirror that's six and a half meters in diameter which will give us exquisite resolution and lots of light collecting ability here's a picture of that telescope at the Johnson Space Center from last summer when it just came out of the large largest thermal vacuum chamber in the world that was outfitted to create space like conditions for this telescope to be tested this is just the telescope it doesn't have the spacecraft or the Sun shield on it at this point but the telescope and the instrument package are there the Atlantic magazine ranked this as one of their most inspirational images of 2017 one of the most hopeful images I should say I agree I think this is an incredibly hopeful image you see engineers standing by this amazing engineering feat looking upward almost as if looking to the sky the possibilities here are endless I'm gonna talk a little bit about the optics for this telescope because it's one of many technological breakthroughs that had to happen I know that John Mather and his last talk talked a little bit about the beryllium that was used to make these tell telescope segments but those telescope segments have been all over the country whether they've you know the or the beryllium that was used to fabricate them was mined out in Utah shaped in Ohio and moved all over the country in terms of testing and finalizing the shape of these mirrors there were 14 stops that those mirrors had to go through and they're lightweight beryllium is a very lightweight substance it's a very dangerous substance to work with but when it's handled properly it can do amazing things in this case these mirrors if they had been Hubble sized they would have weighed about 250 kilograms about 500 pounds instead they weigh about 40 and that's important because launching a mirror like Hubble this size hard really hard heavy so the compromises you build them out of something that's lighter weight and you deploy them now these mirrors are polished so smoothly that if you were to expand one of them to the size of the United States the average deviation on the surface of that mirror would only be about three inches no Rocky Mountains no Mississippi River three inches across the entire United States amazing but you know what that's not the most amazing part of that that's actually fairly straightforward the hard part of that is it you're gonna take these mirrors and you're going to take them from room temperature down to hundreds of degrees below zero well what happens when you cool something and change this shape that's one of the nice properties of beryllium and the most important property for this telescope it doesn't change shape that much with temp your changes problem is it still changes and so these mirrors actually had to be polished at room temperature to the wrong shape so that when they get cooled down they're the right shape yeah whoa exactly it's everybody's reaction yeah that that's that's scary that's scary hard that was that was new technology that had to be developed in order for that to happen it's an optical and an engineering marvel the other big piece of the telescope here is the Sun shield and remember heat-seeking telescope got to make it cold got to shield it from the Sun so we have this kind of quart sized Sun shield with the five layers that have to be deployed and think about that how do you deploy something that's the size of a tennis court how do you fold it up you have to figure out how to fold it unfold it fold it unfold it fold it unfold it to test it and you got to fold it all up again and make sure that it works in space and it's important because you're providing thermal protection here it's 400 degrees in space on the hot side the bottom side of that Sun shield by the time you get up to that fifth layer it's 185 degrees below zero so almost 600 degree change from the top side to the bottom side that's the equivalent of an SPF of about a million and something that has to work right if that if that sun shield doesn't deploy that's it those instruments the telescope everything else is optimized to be cold it wants to be cold and we need it to be cold to see those galaxies and to see into those star forming regions and to see those planets around other stars that were not seeing now with Hubble and so what are we gonna be looking for we're gonna be asking where is the universe's first light how do galaxies grow and evolve over cosmic time what are planetary atmospheres made of and how do stars and planets form those are big questions but they break down into two general themes one is redshift which we talked about earlier and one is dust and molecules again talked a little bit about that with the infrared light we can see further into these dusty regions because the wavelengths of light are longer so astronomers are thinking and oh boy are they thinking they know what they want to do with this telescope they knew what they wanted to do with this telescope even before Hubble was launched what but we thought we wanted we knew what we wanted to do with Hubble before it was launched too and we did those things but many of the things that we've done with Hubble the biggest surprises have been thinking we didn't think about and that's going to be true with this telescope is as well so we're ready to answer the questions that we know how to ask and which questions to ask we're gonna make sure we're also ready to answer those questions we haven't yet thought about asking so in these first stars and first galaxies that we're looking at as we look further and further back in time with Hubble and now with Webb in a few years we're gonna be looking back closer and closer to the Big Bang maybe there within a few hundred million years of that 13.7 billion year old universe time when it was just barely starting to form galaxies you look in the Hubble Deep Field what do you do you look for the very reddest things that you can see those things that aren't so red that they're shifted out of your ability to detect them but the reddest things so astronomers have been cataloging those and getting ready to prepare to observe fields just like this there are programs that were submitted recently or about to be submitted recently to look at exactly this field and to see exactly what it would look like with the James Webb Space Telescope and so having those different colors you see galaxies in a different light whether it's visible or infrared or even ultraviolet Iraq right all of that different kind of light gives us different information about how galaxies exist and interact and evolve what you're seeing on the right hand side is a simulation of two galaxies interacting through their gravitational influence and what you see superimposed on that is every now and then the movie stops and shows you a real Hubble image that looks like that simulation and so you realize how you view these galaxies not only depends on what kind of light you're looking at but where in their evolution they are and from what viewing angle you see those galaxies this is something that was created in our in our outreach section at the Institute I think it's remarkable that they had the foresight to actually be able to go through this simulation and to recognize which Hubble images looked like these things it's not always the same galaxy but you see that different times those colliding galaxies look like different interacting galaxies that we already know exist in the universe looking a little bit closer to home into these star forming regions this is a visible light image of a star-forming region in the constellation Carina there's a question on the screen for you everybody know which one they gonna choose I'm gonna put an arrow on there it's that one how many of you chose that one a few of you all very good very good why because when you look at that one in infrared light you suddenly realize something really interesting is going on and that's in that central region there's a star in there that you can see in the infrared light now when you look through all of that gas it's spewing out streams of gas out its poles and interacting with that surrounding media this is a location where a star is just formed and it's in its early stages of evolution so it's clearing out the region around the star as it spews these Jets outward hidden from view for the most part in that optical image I'll go back to it real quick right there and you see it in the infrared light that Hubble can see James Webb will see this kind of infrared light but also more infrared it'll look further wavelengths redder wavelengths of infrared light and so it'll be even be able to look deeper into images like this and will look and see what's happening even closer to home the planets in our own solar system will monitor them with Webb and we'll be able to look at those patterns of whether that's happening on Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune into the atmospheres and with Webb we'll see deeper into the atmospheres than we see with Hubble because the infrared light penetrates further and we'll be able to see regions that we can't see with Hubble we'll look at the planets moons as well be able to look for water on moons like Titan or Europa and be able to look at Saturn's rings and the compositions will put very very detailed measurements across the Rings there with the with the instrumentation onboard web and we'll be able to see what those rings are made of and ultimately we'll look and we'll see what the atmospheres of planets around other stars look like in the upper right hand corner here you see a transiting exoplanet and you can see the dip of light when the planet passes in front of the star this is what we were talking about in the question and answer session now if you look at that planet and if that planet has an atmosphere the atmosphere around that planet also absorbs and so the fact that it absorbs at specific wavelengths of light tells you in some cases what the atmospheric constituents of that exoplanet are so we can look for things like water or methane or carbon dioxide or oxygen or zone some of these are in the optical wavelength but many of them are in the infrared James Webb will be a water seeking machine as well it will find water in the universe lots of it you know water is necessary for life so perhaps even some of those planets if we're lucky with tests it will tell us exactly where to look and maybe some of those planets will actually be able to look at with Webb in this fashion and be able to detect biomarkers like you see up here on the screen for those cases where we aren't lucky enough where the planet passes in front of the star we're in fact the planet doesn't circle the star along our line of sight Webb may also reveal what those planets look like on the left-hand side you have an animation of a planet being lost in the glow of a star we're just taking a Saturn or Jupiter sized planet and putting it into the light of a star but when you put a coronagraph disc in place in this case and you block the light of that central star suddenly you can see that planet somebody asked earlier about the Eclipse someone who's looking at my slides right it's the same thing only in this case in this case hey that's pretty good in this case the moon was the disc the occulting Eclipse right this is an eclipse a graph all right you see the outer layers of the Sun that you wouldn't have normally seen because the moon's blocking the bright portion of the Sun that's the same kind of a technique only now instead of using the moon we're using a disc inside the instrumentation a mask inside the instrumentation to actually block the light along the optical path we've done this with Hubble and you can see these debris disks and these rings where these planetary systems are forming now there's one such system up at the top there that's what the system will look like we think with James Webb the lower-left but the technique that we're going to be using here for web is about a ten to a hundred times better than what we can do with Hubbell though and so we're going to have a lot better information about these debris disks and the kinds of regions where planets might form around these kinds of stars so this is this is the story this is the hidden transformation of the universe all the way from the Big Bang to life as we know it today Webb is going to illuminate all of that for us this is the story of the creation of elements essentially it's our story right every one of you everything in this room was inside of a star or more right more times than once several times everything to steal the iron aluminum the titanium in your cars the calcium in your teeth the silicon and the sand on your beaches carbon the nitrogen the oxygen and our plants in our atmosphere it was all created inside stars right every universe started out as hydrogen helium all of those other elements were fused from those atoms inside stars and then spewed out to eventually become people sitting in a room listening to a guy up at the front with a laser pointer it's yeah kind of remarkable I took my inspiration from the stars in the backyard and if you're lucky enough on a summer night to go out and look to the south at least from the northern hemisphere you see Scorpius and Sagittarius can't miss Antares one of the brightest stars in the sky orange looks a lot like Mars but Tayloe Scorpius is clear the asterism known as the teapot the eight stars in the teapot in the constellation of Sagittarius if you take that line from the handle of the teapot and you extend it up through the top of the teapot that much again you get to one of the most beautiful pieces of the sky with this pair of binoculars do it dark sky you won't be sorry it's fantastic right along the Milky Way and in there you'll see what I saw in that book by George a bow back in the 1970s you'll see the Lagoon Nebula why am i showing you this picture to end because I'm gonna give you a little tree I'm going to show you what this image looks like and you'll you'll be some of the only people in the world to have seen this image I'm showing tonight the rest of the world gets to see it tomorrow when we released the 28th anniversary image for Hubble put your phones down all right here we go Scorpius Sagittarius teapot zoom into the Lagoon Nebula fade into the Hubble image this is a good one I'll back it out for you in just a minute but we'll take you on a little bit of a fly through here again some of our animators did a really nice job of giving you a little bit of a tour here it's a it's a strange image there's lots happening there are little blobs of dust and gas with stars embedded when you when his image comes out make sure you go to our website and you look at the image on your computer screen and you zoom through it in full resolution even this screen my computer doesn't do it for you up on this screen you'll be amazed you see start stars like this with little bow shocks around them right into carving out little regions hmm it is real yeah it goes down yeah again just just amazing so that's a that's a homework exercise for the audience but I think one that you'll you'll enjoy and there's a nice a nice release coming out tomorrow with that so there it is invisible light and then it wouldn't be a James Webb talk if we didn't also show you what the infrared lights gonna look like and I think that's what it'll look like there so those are two Hubble images of the same region one in it one invisible like one and infrared light beautiful all right so I hope I've given you a little bit of a sense of where I've come from what the inspiration has been for me why we're getting ready for Webb the answer to my questions I'm ready for Webb I hope you are a little bit more ready for Webb the science community is certainly ready for it astronomy is ready for it astronomy needs this telescope to tell us some of the kinds of things that I was talking about tonight to really give us a new view of the universe it's going to be transformative just like Hubble was transformative Webb will be as well and with any luck Webb will become as much a household name and a part of a part of our history as Hubble has been so thank you for that I'd be happy to answer questions that anybody might have audience I'm happy great yep yes sir when will the first images from web be available we'll be calibrating and making sure the observatory is commissioned for about six months after it's launched so end of 2020 I'm hoping maybe we can do that a little more quickly and sneak a few of the engineering images out to you beforehand not sneak em out I mean really some and tell you what's going on with the observatory I mean people are gonna want to know what's happening now and what's Webb looking at I already know I think I know what we're going to be looking at it's going to be spectacular David you want to moderate question is are there any benefits or upsides to the delay and the answer is yes number one we absolutely need to make sure that we get it right right because of all of the complexity there the unfolding of the mirrors the unfolding of that Sun shield unlike Hubble Webb is not meant to be serviced and repaired in space so we get one shot at it and it's going a million miles away so we want to make sure that it works the second question of the second answer to your question is yes it helps us prepare there's still a lot of work we can do on the ground getting the the pipelines and the the techniques that we're going to be using to analyze the data and to getting the science community ready to use that data on day one which we can take advantage of the most important lessons learned with with Hubble I think you have pretty much overcome with web and that is all up testing yeah it just takes time so the question is I mentioned gas giants and outer planets with web what are the plans for comets and inner solar system asteroids and so on Webb's able to see objects at the orbit of Mars or further so it will be looking at some of those things we'll certainly look at comets probably not as close as some of them come to the Sun as we have been able to look at with other telescopes but there are other telescopes out there that we're able to do that with but yeah absolutely we'll be looking at Kuiper belt objects as well things that are much further away solar systems fair game yeah in the pink yes there are millions of lines code the question is what is their question or you want to just know a little more about the software right so some are you still using DOS No got rid of it last week the question is what are we doing about all of the software that's needed and you're right there are millions of lines of code of software that are required to support the science for this mission to operate the instrumentation to do the planning and scheduling for this observatory to do all of the ingest of the proposals and the conversion of those proposals to the observing specifications to calibrate all of the data to archive it and then to actually be able to use all the tools that are available in the archive to pull out the pieces of the data that are necessary for the scientific analysis so that's one of the things that we work very hard on at the Institute and it's one of our main responsibilities making sure that whole round system is ready and you're exactly right there are things again going back to this earlier question that we'd love to be able to do with this extra year that we've got now that the launch has been delayed and we would it be ready we would have been ready to go even this fall but we're happy to have the extra time to prepare for exactly this there are lots of bugs but we're trying to work through all of them get rid of those bugs now we have overflow in the planetarium and I want to give them a chance Seana are there any questions at this moment I think okay well we'll come back to you there's plenty of hands right here right in the middle yes great what can we learn about dark matter and dark energy I think Jennifer Wiseman is actually going to tell you something about that at the next lecture so maybe I shouldn't steal her thunder there but come back in May let's go ahead let's go ahead do it now dark matter and dark energy right in case you weren't feeling small and 200 billion trillion stars wasn't enough that's only five percent of the mass of the universe mass energy budget of the universe of it isn't as dark energy and dark matter and so with images like I showed of those clusters of galaxies and how those galaxies cluster together and the kinds of distortions that are in those fields we can actually map out the Dark Matter composition of those clusters we're doing that with Hubble now we'll be able to do that even better with Webb on the dark energy side being able to have access to the infrared means that we're going to actually be able to probe the supernovae and other events that we use to measure the expansion rate of the universe even to higher precision so we'll be able to get better energy better dark energy measurements but there's other telescopes that are actually better suited for some of the more general properties of dark energy the wide field Infrared Survey telescope which will hopefully launch in the mid 2020s is a Hubble like mir donated from the National Reconnaissance Office that NASA is planning to repurpose to look at the universe and in that case you get a Hubble like image that's a hundred times the field of view of Hubble so in just in just 10 weeks you could survey as much of the universe with that telescope as we've done and with Hubble over the last twenty eight years and and and that will actually revolutionize what we know about dark energy okay I'm looking for a demographically different kind of spread there okay right back there in the in the dark sweater yeah with the stripes oh I love that question what are we thinking about now that we want to do 25 years from now you know what I want 25 years from now I want a 15-meter version of Hubble no I'm serious about that because then we actually will be able to take pictures of Earth's around other stars right and we actually will be able to survey hundreds hundreds of earth-like planets around other stars and then we'll know we'll really know whether or not earth is unique with a telescope like that you can resolve everything in the universe - about 300 light years which means that those big star forming regions no matter where they are in the universe you can resolve to that level so imagine the kind of exquisite detail you would see there again that's going really deep and that gets to the heart of this tracing of the chemical elements from the beginning of time - now that telescope is really going to do that Webb will give us a really good enticement for that but that's the telescope is gonna be needed for that we're going to need an ability to block the light of those central stars that the planets are circling around that's out of reach right now with with Hubble we can we can dim that light of the central star light by about a factor of a hundred thousand with Webb a million maybe ten million if we're lucky with W first a billion and we still need another factor of ten and so if we're gonna do it with an internal coronagraph like that we're still developing the technology some of our folks are working on that we're working with folks at JPL and it Goddard there are others thinking about using big devices like star shades essentially an artificial moon to put in front of the telescope to block the light and so lots of people are thinking about how we might create a telescope like that right there yes the question is when do I think we'll be able to see first light and will it be a singularity explosion or a clash of big banks with this kind of a telescope we actually can't see back to the Big Bang you can only see back as far as when the universe becomes transparent to you you can see back earlier in time with the infrared the Cosmic Microwave Background Michael is being redder than the infrared like we're talking about here that was done with the Coby experiment w map and plunk and so forth here when we're looking for those first stars they would be supernovae that explode in the very early part of the universe more likely we'll see those first galaxies just first collections of stars I hope we see them right off the bat when we start looking for them I don't know whether we will and it may take longer than we think but that's something that people are gonna be looking at or looking for on day one we're gonna be pushing really deep so I would I would hope early on in the in the mission will know how far back in time we can actually look with this telescope and it should be to within just a few hundred million years of the Big Bang that's getting right down there it is now we have two questions here and then I I'm giving the planetarium warning if you have any questions go ahead what was that question again the question is will James Webb be able to observe the cold spot in the microwave background which cold spot are you talking about I'm not sure I understand the question the one that's what they can't hear you oh gosh I'm not up on the latest talk I got us not exactly sure I'm sorry I can't answer that question well we'll have to we'll have to read up on it question right here ooh did you see the two hundred trillion billion the mission it's about eight billion dollars to develop it it's about about an aircraft carrier it's it's about the amount of money that we spend in this country on Halloween candy okay that's another way to look at anything from the planetarium let's go with it it's less than the estimated cost it's less than the estimated cost - what did they want to do they just wanted to repave the baltimore-washington Parkway in 66 it was gonna cost some ungodly sum of money but it actually is listen that's not a bad idea yeah I mean you got to get from one place to another absolutely let's try the planetarium do you have a question yeah so if you if that Mir were the size of the United States you can only polish a mirror so smoothly right there's always a little bit of roughness to it in this case that roughness the average deviation would be no more than three inches on that surface right so from from Maine to California if you took a regular you know shaving mirror or Sun anybody ever see a shaving sorry shouldn't show my age but if you expanded that to the United States you would see deviations on the order of many miles yeah quite a few miles yeah so that's that's the that's the kind of fidelity you're talking about okay question right here yeah the question is have they decided what launch vehicle is used absolutely that's something that was decided very early on the telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket which is being provided by the European Space Agency as part of its contributions to the mission so once the once the Observatory is all ready to go it's all in pieces right now the the telescope and instrument one piece the Sun shield and the spacecraft it's all in the same room out at Northrop Grumman in Southern California when all of the testing and the integration of all of that is done and it's packed up it'll be shipped out of the port on at Long Beach down through the Panama Canal to French Guiana and the spaceport for the Europeans down there in Kourou French Guiana is where to launch on an Ariane 5 how many cross fingers do we have okay there's a question right here so the question is can we expect to get pictures from web that will blow us away in a fashion that helps make it a household name that is certainly our goal and I say that with all seriousness I think some of the infrared pictures I showed you today we're pretty good right they're going the pictures from web will be better than that and and I think that the real power of those images at least early will be in their comparison to what we've seen with those really good optical images you're right that's light that we don't normally see and it has to be colorized in a way that we can actually extract information or our brains process what's happening there but I do think that's possible and we have some very talented people who are very good at that and so I'm convinced we're going to see some absolutely stunning images from web in the green great question so she would like me to describe the process somebody goes through to make a Hubble observation okay so I'm your average astronomer out there actually I'm gonna be your above average astronomer because I'm gonna write a really good proposal once a year we've got a certain in we're gonna we're gonna know once a year we put out a call for proposals to the science community and they respond by writing proposals that are judged on their scientific merit by their peers so we bring about a hundred and fifty astronomers in from around the world to the Space Telescope Science Institute and we review typically in a given year for Hubble we review about 1,200 proposals over a week period or so and with Webb we're expecting maybe 1215 1800 the first time that competition is steep typically with Hubble it's one in five or one in six proposals will get selected with Webb early on it's probably going to be closer to one in ten and once that proposal is judged on its scientific merit the science committee says the science reviewers say yes this is a proposal that should be done they make recommendation to me as director and I say that sounds like a good idea to me and we ask them then for that full observing specification so they tweak the observing specification using the software and the tools that we've given them that goes to our planning and scheduling team the long-range planners produce a calendar that's appropriate for about a whole year with all of the observations that were selected and then each week they pull from that calendar the set of observations that we're going to do for a week and we upload the commands to the observatory to execute those particular observations the observations get executed the engineering and science telemetry come back down we unpack that we calibrate the science data for them using the science data itself and the engineering data and then we put it into the archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute The Observer then comes in uses our tools their tools to extract that data and to do the science to start the proprietary period on those data is a year for for for most of the smaller programs for the big programs it's about six months for any observations that I award as director with my discretionary time it's no proprietary period and so I've already selected about 500 hours of time that's going to be used at in the very early parts of the observations and that will be available to everybody everywhere we're quickly moving to a lower and lower proprietary period for astronomical data right i which i think is a very good thing did I hear applause and and so you know if in my perfect world all of the data would be non-proprietary immediately but this is how it was established for weapon but the key is that this is peer-reviewed anyone can apply absolutely and once it's in the archive and it's gone past them not past the proprietary period anyone in the world with an internet connection can download it so you got to have your daus machine really well tuned up okay there's one question here but then we have two in the planetarium yes what recommendation would I have for somebody entering the field of astronomy and astrophysics I would say if it's something that you're really interested in make sure that you you start you study hard and that you you know you really are interested in it you make sure that you have a good math background make sure that you have a good science background make sure that you go to a school where you can interact with your professors and others and really begin projects in the field early you know I was lucky I was able to actually do some hands-on projects in those laboratories that I was talking about that makes a big impact a lot more fun too and yeah a lot more fun and hey you may even earn a few bucks over the summer doing it which is great and then there are there are loads of opportunities out there so I say if you're interested go for it there's also lots of internships and summer programs that you can take part at the government centers at Goddard at JPL within industry companies like Northrop Grumman sponsor lots of interns we at the Institute typically having summer intern program as well you can find out information about that on our website I guess I would just say be curious and be persistent and we've got explainers who are learning astronomy by showing our telescope and how to use it to the public so you we have those kinds of programs as well but that's just a selfless plug now a few questions from the planetarium and then by the way the observatory is open it's clear and how about have a look I'm not sure what they're looking at maybe the same I don't know what but can I just follow up one more short question comment on that last question there are many ways to dissipate in programs like this that don't require you to be an astronomer like me there are thousands of people across the country whose skills and talents are necessary not just to build this machine but to make its results available to the world like I said earlier educators graphic artists business resource people IT people all of these have some number crunchers number crunches yeah people who actually enjoy working with numbers all of these people have to a lot of us do I do I do math problems to put myself to sleep at night it drives my wife crazy but I didn't probably too much information should we switch to the planetarium yeah let's go to a planet okay anyway anyway the the upside of that is there are lots of ways that you can participate and we need lots of different kinds of talents to make these kinds of big projects possible exactly planetarium questions [Music] what a great question for the for the questioner have you heard of the frontier fields no okay Hubble recently did a program called the frontier fields where we do just that we use gravitational lensing which is a phenomenon by which you've got a mass in space and it warps the space around it right this is something that Albert Einstein predicted you put a mass into space and it warps the space-time around it to continuum and what happens is that mass actually acts as a lens so an object behind that mass and viewed from your side the light comes around that mass it gets bent and it gets magnified I might get distorted but it also gets magnified and so that's called gravitational lensing and so the the light looks different than it would look if the lens weren't there if that mass weren't there well we've used that technique recently with Hubble in a program called the frontier fields to actually look deeper into space than we can look just normally in a field like the Deep Field and by using that cosmic lens it's like putting a big telescope out there using the telus using the universe as a telescope using that cluster as a telescope to magnify that light and some of the most distant objects we've seen in the universe are a result of that the fact that that light has been lens dand magnified on its way to us if that lens weren't there we wouldn't have seen those galaxies with Hubble right so we're going to definitely exploit that with Webb as well and in fact that's probably our best way of probing the very most distant objects by getting that boost and amplification that little bit of extra oomph beyond what we would just get with the mirror itself yeah that's real science fiction in my mind boy that's incredible one more question from the Lana terraeum and then we'll have to close up oh that's a good question we're not too worried about space debris with James Webb let us know if you you know something we don't know too much junk out there it out it out too there's not too much junk actually it's actually a fairly clean region relative to say lower Earth orbit where there's lots of junk floating around and a lot of that's man-made debris hobby it's already messed up lowers orbit yeah with Webb we probably will not have to take much in the way of defensive action for debris one of the reasons that we've got a five layer sun shield is that we expect there will occasionally be micrometeorites or something that come through those layers and the fact that there's five layers means that's gonna be penetrating those layers on an angle and so the chance of it coming through in a way that allows light to eventually pass through to hit the mirrors probably pretty small all of those calculations have been worked and I've been assured that we don't have to worry about that if you look at an observatory like Hubble Hubble's mirror even though we've been pointing at the sky now for 28 years the the mere quality is almost as good it's indistinguishable from when it was launched and so in that respect you know the micro meteorite damage isn't too bad on the other hand if you look at one of Hubble's transmitters there's a there's a hole this size in it and that was a close call for the observatory so it can't happen but out of l2 it's a lot cleaner than it is in low-earth orbit so we we should be pretty good there another good reason for being there okay well I want to thank everybody we're good bit over our time the Observatory is open I want to invite you back in May when Jennifer Wiseman will explore the other 95% of the universe that we ignored today thank you so much [Applause]

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Views: 141,357

Rating: 4.6572542 out of 5

Keywords: Hubble, telescope, NASA, science, National Air and Space Museum

Id: TBvaIUdmiEY

Length: 76min 8sec (4568 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018