Launch of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope

[Music] pressure looks good [Music] yikes you bet concur we don't need any more of these good morning and welcome to the guyana space center where you are looking at a live view of the ariane 5 on launch complex ela 3 with the james webb space telescope inside getting ready for its historic mission and trip to space and also welcome to the guiana space center where we are live on location for this incredible and historic mission and for those of you who have watched nsf live nsf broadcast before you know that we don't normally show faces and i promise this isn't the chris gebhardt face show but we wanted to take a special moment to show you where we are and to say an immense thank you to everyone who has supported us everyone who has found us and come to trust us as a valued source of news and information and a way to get all of your questions answered about all of the missions that we cover thank you to everyone um including the entire team at nasa space flight i am the one who is here but this stream is for all of you and thank you thank you thank you um and what an incredible day this is going to be uh right now everything is on track for a liftoff of the james webb space telescope within the 32-minute launch window that opens at 12 20 utc or 7 20 eastern time on the united states and canada's eastern seaboards so without that with that i'm going to throw it back to the studio for formal introductions and get ready for an incredible broadcast and hopefully an incredible launch wow that is just so awesome to see chris down there uh he's had a long journey to get there of course um but back here in the studio i am stephen maher i'm one of the photographers here for nasa space flight on the space coast uh joining me today of course as you just saw that was chris gebhardt he is our assistant managing editor uh and he's gonna be bringing us these live views uh from french guiana it's it's incredible i can't believe it and also uh with us we've got john galloway you know him as dos typically about now he's saying give me a five by five in chat how you doing das oh it's true uh we're like four by five it looks like this morning but uh thanks everybody for joining us this is going to be pretty cool yep and then uh another one of our members here at nasa space flight we've got hagen warren how you doing hagen i'm doing good excited to be here and yeah just super super super excited to see this amazing observatory get off the ground and head into space yeah yeah and we've got a lot of information to share with y'all i know you guys have questions make sure you're tagging us at nasa space flight um also with me today we have thomas berghardt how you doing thomas i'm doing well steven looking forward to this very historic launch and i can't wait to see it get off the ground like hagan said a very important mission and very honored that nasa space flight can bring some live coverage of this launch to you all yeah and this is this this is a mission in the making sense before some of these space fans probably some of the people on our team included it's been in the making since before you're even born i know it's been in the making since since before i like really got into space i mean the james webb space telescope has been in the making for quite some time over 25 years and uh we don't need to talk about how many of us that makes james webb order then but oh yeah very excited to get this going yeah that's right um let's see don't forget to uh tag us at nasa space flight in chat we're going to do our best to answer all of the questions there's a lot of interesting things to talk about with this um i i don't know let i feel like maybe you know let's let's talk about just what what this mission means i mean we know it's it's sort of a successor to the hubble space telescope but not exactly uh chris you want to do you want to sort of talk about that i would absolutely love to yes um it is it's exactly what you said steven it's a successor to the hubble space telescope it is not a replacement to hubble and this is very important because hubble and james webb while there's a little bit of the infrared wavelength that they do overlap and what see it is they don't primarily see in the same wavelengths james webb can see far far deeper into the infrared which is why it has to be incredibly cold to see back and to see this this type of wavelength much colder than the hubble space station really james webb is interested in the infrared bandwidth where hubble sees in the near infrared the near ultraviolet and the visible bands so very very different and because of that they're going to be able to do very different things right we've all seen the iconic images from the hubble space telescope well we're not going to get those from james webb because it doesn't see the way hubble sees but what james webb is going to be able to actually give us is the ability to see back 400 million years after the big bang when the 13.3 billion years back in time to when the very first stars and galaxies were starting to form in our universe um it is not the farthest back in history that a telescope can see that honor goes to the kobe telescope which confirms the cosmic microwave background radiation of the big bang and actually one of the prime on that kobe mission from the late 80s and early 90s scientist we are getting some hiccups here in his work in how the universe came to be why planets like earth and our solar system we are struggling to maintain that connection uh can you can you hear us chris do you do we have you on comms oh we do yes yes sorry what did you not hear what was the last thing you heard do the whole thing again chris tell us what you don't know no no it just hit the whole thing a few seconds ago okay okay so yeah so james hope is going to help us see back you know and help us understand how how our universe basically came to be um and that's something hubble can do but it's something james webb is far more suited to um so not a replacement but a successor to the hubble space telescope right and and so it's going to be looking way back in time um to some of some of the earliest light and i know that uh you know there's a there's been questions out there like why is it why does it focus so much on infrared you know like we're used to seeing you know hubble's you know beautiful visible light spectrum photos and and i think some people might be wondering what's so special about infrared why do we need to go into the infrared uh with james webb chris thomas thomas you want to take that i'm going to leave that to hagen he's the science section oh hey i just know about rockets man sorry yeah yeah i can give it my best shot um so infrared is very interesting in that it allows us to see through things in a way so as we know out in the universe there's lots of dust everywhere and one of the big things that james webb is going to be able to do with the wavelength range that a lot of its instruments are going to be observing in it's going to allow us to see through that dust and see stars planetary systems see those cosmic objects forming behind that dust that we previously haven't been able to see before and because of james webb's i mean incredible size we're going to be able to see this stuff extremely clearly um james webb's instruments are going to be observing in a variety of wavelengths um there's three there's at least three different um wavelengths that j wavelength ranges should i say that james webb will be observing in um so basically the big point as to why infrared is that it's going to allow us to see parts of the universe that we haven't seen before right isn't it something where like uh the dis the most distant light is so redshifted that you just can't see it in visible light right at least yes yeah indeed indeed if you can hear me indeed indeed yeah yeah we've got you now yeah we we are at the at the mercy of the existing uh internets and bandwidths there's lots of other people down there and so you know hopefully we can uh maintain a good connection with chris down there in french thank you let me tell you about it take it away weird we are definitely yeah take it away we are definitely at the mercy of the network connections down there um ese has been fantastic with helping us get online but we are sort of using the network connection the that was provided to us there at the space center and so we are sort of at the mercy of exactly what's going on with that network today you heard a little bit of hiccups there with chris and uh when we have chris's feet on there maybe some video but you know something we got a live video signal coming from french guiana so that's honestly pretty darn cool it's got a rocket in it it does it does have a rocket in it so um everybody thank you so much for joining us as always and thank you for bearing with us because we're a scrappy team that tries to do things above and beyond and sometimes there's some hiccups but we appreciate you all always being there and understanding that uh we didn't put 10 billion dollars into this broadcast right geez but uh you know what i think some people are gonna really let the next sentence that comes out of my mouth if you can hear me yes there's a there's a patch of blue sky and i'm not making that up oh yes beautiful uh all right let's um let's hit some uh questions here we've got a few rolling in here i've queued some up and uh we have to start with the traditional question from brian mandel what are the four towers [Laughter] uh i guess i could feel that one like uh any of the other launch pads you've seen nasa space flight broadcast from uh those are the lightning protection system for ariane 5's launch pad ela 3 and uh of course down in the jungle in south america you do get some rainy and some stormy weather every once in a while you can see a pretty thick cloud that goes chris has mentioned maybe we'll get a patch of blue sky but yep just like uh those pads out of cape canaveral that you see sometimes you know still have lightning protection here on this pad which is making its nsf debut if you will right on yeah it's it's super cool that i i mean it's it's almost too much for me chris is down there on location and uh once once some of this weather clears we're gonna get to see live views uh from uh from where chris is standing um let's see let's go back to the question bag uh ben glasgow is wondering uh if james webb has 25 year old tech is yeah chris go ahead yeah to some to some degree it does um but a lot of it is more upgraded than you would think um i mean like you know like the the mirror technology and everything is what it is from when it was made but you know the electronics the avionics and things like that are not pieces of technology um the sun shield that has to deploy is not 26 year old technology in fact they went through many different iterations of the sunshield design before they settled on this one more recently so it's it's it's a it's a mix but most of it is more current than assume when this was first approved back in 1996. gotcha so it's it's like they started development back then but that's not necessarily when they chose every single bit of hardware that's on board right exactly exactly right uh and i just wanted to point out a very like it's sort of like well if you look at the ariane 5 go ahead go ahead oh it's just going to say steven it's kind of just like what you said like we're looking at ariane 5 right now while the around is also 25 years old but that's not 25 year old pieces of technology right um i i i i don't want to just you know point out you know money stuff right off the bat but a a very generous 150 super chat just came in from jira saying i have not been this excited for a christmas morning in a very long time thank you nsf keep up the great work thank you very much that's super generous of you um one of one of the questions that i had um is okay so once the mirror is fully deployed is is there is there a need to ever like individually um move each little panel to maybe change sort of i don't know the focus or or whatever or is it once it's once it's deployed the mirror is locked in places it just stays that way forever um i could take this uh yeah yes they um once the mirror is deployed um each mirror segment each of the 18 mirror segments does have an each individual each individual mirror segment has a motor and they will use those motors to basically calibrate the mirrors and basically to focus the telescope this will come weeks after launch obviously um but yes they will be moving the mirrors now it is not by a large amount these mirrors will be moving very very very tiny amounts to be as precise as possible when focusing the telescope okay yeah very tiny amounts that is yeah as precise as we can get yeah well it's it's like sub millimeter level movement on these things is how fine those motors actually are on each of those individual panels yeah wow very cool um let's see let's go back to the question bag tech tan saying uh is it hot in french guyana well chris well let me put it this way this born and raised florida boys right at home oh yeah yeah no it has consistently been a high temperature of around 32 c and a low of around 27. see so uh very very warm very muggy uh in the tropics i mean we're only three degrees north of the equator so there isn't a lot of seasonal variation here and we are on the northern tip of the amazon so yes it is it is rained every day yes okay well it is a rain forest so i i would expect that indeed indeed the jaguars like it the jaguars yeah oh that's the bitey thing you have to look out for here it doesn't the mighty things don't come out of the water here they come out of the forest at you can actually warn you about that like and watch out for headquarters did they really really do they really do there was one scene at the ariane pad a couple weeks ago yeah no kidding yep so a different security yeah different types of security exactly um right right but like all other space ports like well not all but like most other spaceports around the world the guiana space center is a wildlife preserve as well so the jaguars have actually been reintroduced to the local population here wow that's that's kind of cool that's like up here uh in the u.s uh how they reintroduced wolves to yellowstone at one point and it really helped out the uh the local ecology indeed um okay going back to the questions mr x mr y says is so is this the last flight for ariane 5 uh i can go ahead and take that no it is not uh they were getting close and because the james webb obviously has a very high priority mission um arianespace kind of said over the course of a couple james webb related delays that you know if aryan five needs to stick around extra long to get james webb into space uh whenever it is ready they would keep area 5 operational but it did not really come to that there are a couple other commercial area and 5 missions remaining it is being phased out in favor of the new arion 6 rocket which is set to debut possibly as early as next year but ariane 5 will have more flights after the james webb lunch before it is actually retired yeah i think i got curious about this because i figured we'd get this question there are nine left including james webb um and the after james webb the most important one is the juice mission to jupiter's moons from the european space agency in 2023 um and then there's one more after that right now in 2024 so ariane 5 still got a couple more years all right and sticking with uh questions about the rocket uh how many engines does ariane 5 have coming from stephanie ball over here ah well you can't cheat and use the name of the rocket for the number of engines like you can on falcon 9 because ariane five is the fifth area on rocket so it's named differently uh only one main engine on the arion five core stage is a volcan ii engine powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen uh that's joined by the two side boosters that you can see pretty clearly on your current view two solid rocket boosters and then the upper stage also has a single uh vacuum optimized engine also powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen um so it's all single engine uh stages for ariane five right on um and i think this one might be good for hagen uh cool sharma saying uh doesn't the openness of jwst make it more vulnerable than hubble um i'm kind of confused here by what openness is mean like how how the mirror of hubble is inside a cylinder and sort of protected yeah yeah um you know it probably it does likely make it more vulnerable than hubble because obviously james webb's mirror is going to be completely exposed to space so there is that risk of micrometeorite impacts and that type of situation however it's it's not going to be by a lot typically if there are micrometeorite strikes they're typically going to be extremely extremely extremely small but it is also worth noting that on the mirror the mirror teams have also on top of the gold layer on the mirror they have coated the entirety of the mirror in its indiv in each of its 18 individual mirror segments with a protective coating so i think uh if you hit a micro meteor the little thin shell of the hubble is not going to help you much if if anything probably the bigger vulnerability for web is that its mirror is just a bigger target it's got a much larger mirror than hubble so there's a larger surface area that could actually get hit but i don't know that the tube of the hubble from micro meteorite strikes would really protect it that much because if you get hit in space by something you get hit in space like it's not like it just sort of barely plinks into you yeah and i i think another interesting um element to this is the low earth orbit artificial debris environment versus there is no artificial debris environment yeah to the grange point where this is going but you've got a bigger surface so the things we're not worried about in earth orbit are going to be worries over there so yeah it's it's it's that's a fascinating question and a really good one yeah yeah it is worth noting at least off the top of my head i do not believe the hubble space telescope has been has encountered any notable micro meteorite or other debris strikes over its mission chris correct me if i'm wrong no that that's correct at the last settlement and that went up is the last information we have but yeah no hubble has actually been remarkably clean as has the iss to be fair yeah these events are fairly rare when they do happen and even when they do depending on where it hits the spacecraft can sometimes be fine still but it's not a very common occurrence anyway especially out at a lagrange point where there's no artificial debris to add to the micro meteorite potential but the interesting thing about the lagrange points is that we we you know they can capture stuff and then keep it there and stuff we might not be able to see so it is a weird it is a weird balance yeah but what i would think and i do actually i think this is probably a good segue to talk about lagrange points but let me see if i understand this if if something were to get caught in a lagrange point that would significantly lower its relative velocity to james webb as opposed to something just zipping through there and and colliding basically through it probably right like 100 yes okay yeah so yeah go ahead yeah because lagrange points the easiest way to describe these is so when you when you take two bodies in in a system so in this case we're taking the sun and the earth there are five points around those two bodies where you basically have a really really stable gravity field where the gravity wells are kind of canceling each other out if you think of a gravity well right and then you think of the tippy tippy tippy top of that before you fall down into the well well if you can balance something right on that top point that's the lagrange point and objects put there stay there unless you exert a force on them so it's not like they can be perturbed by other gravity or things like that they're very stable regions of space and because of that and what you were saying stephen about relative velocity the other major benefit to sending a vehicle like webb and lucy that launched earlier this year is going to the jupiter lagrange points um but basically you don't have to use a lot of propellant to keep the vehicle in the lagrange point so it basically is a way to utilize gravity to reduce the mass of the propellant that you have to take with you to do the mission james webb only has like a teeny tiny bit of propellant doesn't it yes it's like what is it like 300 kilograms or something like that yeah it's very low it's very low i i think the total mass of the spacecraft is 6.6 metric tons or 6.3 metric tons and and yeah like six metric tons of that is the actual vehicle itself not the propellant yeah yeah and aren't there there's different types of lagrange points right like some of them are more stable where like like if a satellite is sitting in the lower grange point it naturally wants to stay there but then there's some where it needs a little help staying there right um well it depends on where you put it in there if you just put it in the lagrange point it's gonna stay there but if you want something like web and this is why web has to have a little bit of propellant web is actually gonna orbit the l2 lagrange point so it's not going to the direct center of it it's gonna go around the center of that lagrange point as it as it does its mission um so there are different ways you can utilize the lagrange points i think is the actual answer to your question stephen it's just the way you choose to utilize them in that regard yeah it's it's pretty cool so we've got um so we've got the one we've got l2 where james webb is going and then is is there one that kind of stays like behind the moon or something don't we have something there yes that's the l2 point is the one behind the moon yep um and then the l and then the other and then there are two points that are two lagrange points that are in earth's orbit the l5 and the l3 the grange points are 60 degrees ahead of earth and 60 degrees behind earth in its orbit of the sun then the l1 point is directly between the earth and the sun and then the l5 point is directly behind the sun from earth and you switched a couple of those l3 is directly behind the sun four and five are the ones ahead of him behind earth but close enough i could really pronounce it correctly we've got we've got this great graphic on screen to clarify all that but yeah right there we go yeah and what's sort of interesting is that this l2 point it's it's further out and if you have learned any orbital mechanics or played some kerbal you know that if you're further out from the sun you typically are going to orbit more slowly but the magic of the lagrange points is it stays with the earth without having it it's it's weird it's crazy how did we figure this out it's weird interactions and balances of gravity is is what it is it's not a physical body that's following its own orbital dynamics it's not like there's a thing at l2 that is is orbiting the sun it's a place where the balance of gravity works out so there's special characteristics in the smart cookies that launch these things have figured out how they can use those special gravity balancing characteristics to our advantage basically you know i wonder how like it was this like a mathematical thing someone figured it out and they're like i think we could park something right there or was it like we noticed some bits of debris hanging out in one spot and we're like whoa why's that happening do we know does anybody know off the top of their head you can mathematically figure out like that lagrange point would do what it was um i'm not sure whether it's original discovery came from that or came from noticing like asteroids or something forming at what would we we would eventually figure out where the garage points uh but you could you it's obviously through mathematical analysis of how gravity works you can figure that out also i do want to yeah oh sorry um it was mathematics it's actually named right okay you just discovered them that's what i thought but okay um also i do want to add that there's a lot of every two body system has a set of lagrange points so in this particular case uh james webb is going to the sun earth l2 point which is different from the earth moon l2 point because there's a lagrange point on the other side of the moon face from earth that you could sit at and i believe off the top of my head it's changi oh god whatever the chinese comsat that sits on the far side of the moon uses that point for example um and then there's also other lagrange points for any other two body systems so like we mentioned the jupiter lagrange points where lucy is flying too that's the lagrange points from the sun jupiter system and you can kind of do that for any two body systems so it's important to distinct which large points we're actually talking about because each system has five uh but the l2 point for the earth sun system is where james webb is going to start its journey to today and it won't get there for about 30 days it's a nice long coast phase with a lot of deployment sequences between launch and actually getting there but it's about a 30 day trip to get to that l2 point and we're going to be live the entire time [Laughter] um no chris we need you to stay in french guyana for a month is that okay oh dear yeah with your camera pointed at the empty launchpad [Laughter] okay um let's see i'm gonna go back to some questions nebula x was wondering why is it called james webb ah i will take that one um so this is named after the second nasa administrator who was um the administrator during the apollo era um that is who it's named after um for in all fairness and for all sides of the story no one in the astronomical community is really happy with this name um there's not a lot of there's some not so great things that have come to light about the person and some of his personal views regarding uh people of the lgbtq community and people of minority status um there was a petition to change the name uh that was not accepted by nasa so its name is james webb uh but that is that is the short version of the name and the controversy surrounding it right on yeah i'm sure lots of people were curious about that and there is your reasoning um okay here this is an interesting question here uh keith egan saying have they built in a fuel cap for jwst so they can refuel and extend the life of a mission if a mission becomes possible in the coming years and then they say merry christmas they have they did it they they actually there is something there it is not it there is something on it that if someone were to come to them and say hey we'd love to go refuel this for you there is technically a way to do it but it is very important to note there are absolutely no plans for that at this time um but there is something on there that would allow it if possible but yeah thomas what was going to say i was gonna say i think i saw a comment from dr zerbach and the thomas erbachian is the head of the science mission directorate at nasa and i believe he made a statement in the lead up to this launch saying that basically once james webb is on orbit commissioned and started against science operations that their teams will then be looking at how can we spend the next 10 years because james webb has a 10-year design life span because of this fuel constraint of can we develop a mission to go refuel it in 10 years i believe that's going to be one of the priorities after this after jane's web gets started do i have that correct yeah kind of yeah with the added caveat of what i said where like is but someone's got to do it right someone's got to figure out and design the vehicle that can actually go do it which wouldn't necessarily be hard northrop grumman has a fleet i was going to say mission extension vehicle yep and robotic servicing vehicles um of course um i don't say this is a fanboy but if starship becomes a reality starship could certainly be a contender to go out and and do something like that if you wanted an astronaut on there too but yeah a lot of it is exactly though what you said thomas it's like we kind of just want to get it up there and get through the terrifying 344 unfolds which we're going to get to those um but but yeah they did think ahead for that eventuality is is i think the basic answer just a lot is going to depend on what happens in the next 30 days and it's worth mentioning this is something that we haven't really talked about yet is about why going out and servicing the james webb would be a lot different from servicing the hubble space telescope the hubble space oscilloscope of course launched by the space shuttle is in low earth orbit it is pretty easily accessible relatively speaking in fact a couple shuttle missions did go out obviously there was the original repair mission and then some additional servicing missions beyond that to keep it up and running and that was up until the shuttle was retired and those were all conducted during spacewalks evas by astronauts who had flown up on the shuttle that is relatively easy to do when you're in low earth orbit when you are out in a lagrange point it takes a lot more energy to get out there we showed earlier how much farther away it is from earth and because of the gravity physics it actually takes a fair amount of delta v to leave a lagrange point getting there isn't too bad but leaving a lagrange point and coming back to earth is fairly difficult which is why we mentioned things like the mission extension vehicle by northrop grumman which is a robotic spacecraft designed to go rendezvous with a satellite provide refueling services things like that because then we don't have to worry about getting the spacecraft back obviously if we send an astronaut out there to conduct a space walk we're going to need them to come back and that's why we would mention something like starship which has you know the delta v required to do interplanetary missions and thus might have the performance to bring crew to the l2 point and come back um that's feasible we have obviously starship is still in an earlier phase in development um but that is the difference there and why we would probably be leaning more towards a robotic servicing mission to get out to that point and do any work that needs to be done on the on the james webb space telescope whether that's just a nominal refueling after 10 years or whether there becomes a need for a more not emergency status but a more on-demand servicing mission to conduct a repair or to upgrade something things like that yeah thomas and as you were doing the discussion there we've just crossed under t minus 60 minutes before launch so that launch coming up at 7 20 a.m eastern time it's going to be 9 20. local time there but we just crossed under 60 minutes to the uh first oh chris this is the opening of the window right we have a little bit of a window it's not 32 minutes today 32 minutes so that's are they going for the opening of the window with this time that we're looking at yes yes so the way an ariane 5 countdown works is very similar to a falcon 9 countdown there are no built-in holes um so ariane will just move through her timeline toward the they call it h0 um but it's the same as t zero um for the ignition time but then at t minus seven minutes right before the um right before the terminal count sequence begins that is their hold point where if they need to stop because oh hey you know like we just need another weather balloon or hey like there's a little boat that we need that just needs an extra minute to get out of the exclusion zone they can hold there and then there's a 32 minute window today and the window but it's not a 32 minute window every single day the duration of the window each day will change just based on moon alignments and everything like that um for for where for where things are and the specific physical setups for the day but in general that's that's the window we've got today and that's how ariane would do it if if there was a hole that was needed yeah the lagrange point makes for some interesting launch windows it kind of fluctuates day to day and it's kind of weird and messy but uh 32 minutes is our window today it's also slightly constrained and the reason they have a specific launch time here is that ariane 5's upper stage is not reignitable and so this is pretty much a direct ascent to a lagrange point for like of a better word um the upper stage will only connect one burn spacecraft deployment is just about half an hour after liftoff after the core stage and upper stage complete their burns um and so that yeah that's kind of the window we're looking at today and uh actually you just hit this thomas uh do you want to uh uh would can you tell us um why doesn't ariane just use the upper stage to get into a parking orbit and then reignite when it's over the equator exactly it is because that upper stage has not been designed to re-light itself it is only designed for one burn um iron fives the majority of aryan 5's manifest has been commercial communication satellites going out to geostationary orbit um and the upper stage conducts one burn to get them into that transform and let the spacecraft do the rest um and so that hasn't required multiple burns um especially when you're launching so close to the equator to begin with that is that is why yeah because basically the upper stage would just complete the initial insertion into parking orbit and just have to reignite a second later because it would be over the equator at that point i was watching a uh a scott manley video last night and he mentioned the very slight very like infinitesimally small chance that ariane 5 could send james webb past that lacrosse point and i'm like why are you saying this [Laughter] um okay so let's uh let's hit a couple more questions uh this i'm gonna i'm gonna peg you chris with this tony blue wants to know why did nasa pick esa as a launch provider ah yes i like this question a lot um the ariane 5 was picked as the launch vehicle because of the payload fairing the payload fairing for the ariane 5 is 4.7 meters in diameter and 16 meters in length it was the largest payload fairing available for james webb at the time still kind of is um and the the so that was one of the primary driving factors for it and and just remember this is the one this is the biggest fairing and it still has to fold up 344 times to fit inside of it so so that was part of it but also the the other main reason why the ariane 5 was chosen is because james webb is an international collaboration between the united states the european space agency and the canadian space agency um and for that this is part of the european space agency's financial contribution to the mission so esa did not charge nasa for the launch of this mission esa is absorbing that cost as part of their contribution to web and though and the way this sort of works is that you know canada built one of the instruments on board web um europe was involved in the building of two of the instruments the us was involved in the building of three of them so all of that sort of goes okay the us is guaranteed this much percentage time of use of web esa is now guaranteed this much percentage usage time and canada is now guaranteed this much time on the telescope so that's sort of how it all worked out to get us to the amazon rainforest for the launch of web of course worth mentioning that going forward when we look at the next generation of space telescopes that might come after james webb we have a couple more options for perhaps even bigger fairings the jumping out of me is new glenn has a nice big payload fairing starship obviously that payload bay is fairly large what how does this compare with the extended fairing that's going to be available for like falcon heavy and also maybe on vulcan centaur what are the dimensions of those compared to ariane 5 grace yeah so those would be slightly more compatible um if those actually existed now that might have been a consideration um however when we had to choose the launch vehicle five years ago they were not but yes um the larger payload fairings that are coming for the vulcan for uh and and for falcon heavy and then as you mentioned the new glenn and the starship designs all would be possibilities if we were talking about launching this mission five ten years from now which thankfully we're not thankfully we're under an hour and 25 years in the making and we're under an hour yep uh well what is what does weather look like does anybody have eyes on it just started pouring down rain at the control center actually but it's uh not raining at the launch pad right this moment okay but important thing to note here rain unlike in florida is not a problem for the ariane 5. um it is the lightning that we're worried about primarily here um and the weather forecasts do not indicate that lightning or winds are necessarily an issue now that doesn't mean something can't come up it just means the odds are in our favor that we will have a a clean green board as follows as far as weather which is called meteo so when you hear them call out medio that is what you're looking for on the display board or listening for uh for weather um but there was a good enough prediction that we would have an okay uh that we would be okay on lightning and upper level winds and the other important thing to note here the delay from yesterday to today because of upper level winds was not because of sheer it was not because ariane 5 would be blown off course or not be able to compensate with its thrust vector control systems it was because if something went wrong which we hope it doesn't if something went wrong and the vehicle had to be destroyed the upper level winds would blow all the debris back on to land and back toward the control centers which is a major range safety violation so that's why the upper level winds were out of limits yesterday all right um i've got a couple of questions here regarding cameras so first we've got maybe on a stick asking does the ram 5 have onboard cams uh they do we don't always see them live during the launch obviously we're bringing in the official feeds in addition to chris's camera that we saw earlier and so whether or not we see them during the ascent remains to be seen but there are engineering cameras like most modern rockets for engineering purposes that sometimes we can get a glimpse of they should have those cameras at least on the first stage because we've seen footage of booster separation we've also seen cameras on the upper stage to see footage of fairing separation before um so there are onboard cameras on arien 5 and are there any cameras on the telescope itself to like observe the deployment sequence or anything that was the next question from uh from from louis uh virioth um did they say it is our interview i don't believe so i mean there's obviously cameras on board in the instruments the only one that comes to mind is the fine guidance sensor but yeah that's not aiming at the telescope so i do not believe so gotta trust the data here it's like the cobbler's kids have no shoes here like the television doesn't have any engineering back in time it can see everything except itself yeah it has a mirror and it can't even see itself i mean [Laughter] oh that is awesome uh so funny um okay i'm gonna run down some of some of the support that we've got mainly because uh chris's trip down to french guyana would not happen without all of the support from members and just people watching the stream and and all that sort of stuff westy iii saying morning and merry christmas everyone thank you for taking the time off your christmas everyone at nsf have a drink on me thank you very much musical wolves one of our regulars here saying is this the first launch to happen on christmas day oh oh absolutely hold on i'ma pull up a list because we got our friend michael with a handy dandy uh uh app called next space flight that happens to do an on this day thing hold on if i can get my phone out fast enough but no definitely not uh are there any especially like notable ones while i pull up this ones well we almost had one here at the cape on um on christmas day if crs24 hadn't launched right on its initial day or its 24 hour uh delay then it would have had an attempt today quite a few russian missions have launched yeah i was going to say yeah i am pulling up this list i see about eight billion russian missions that happen to have launched on december 25th um the most recent one was a chinese long march 2c with the yao again satellites on 2017 but nothing like super notable missions a lot of like russian cosmo satellites and things like that though um and i want to hit this this one that just came in 200 pounds thank you very much ian glennon uh happy holidays felice navidad and merry christmas to all staff and members of nasa's space flight and i would like to add a happy festivus to all of you out there who uh who know what that is uh we will ariane 5 will be performing the feats of strength hopefully here in 48 minutes and if it doesn't we're all going to have the airing of the grievances yes oh right uh yes i'm glad you guys are on board with me on that one um i am wearing my festivus shirt now chris who knows the one i'm talking about i was gonna say you have to say and and for the rest of us uh we can celebrate festivus right yes yes um yeah and hopefully we'll have a festivus miracle today when james webb is launched and uh begins its journey to the l2 lagrange point it's it's really coming down out there now we're actually getting some of the rain noises on the microphone there and visibility from chris's vantage point this is chris's camera it has dropped significantly you can need the four towers and the vertical this launch structure there in the background um but we'll see if this rain hopefully clears up again like y'all said the lightning is the concern it's not the rain that we're worried about it's the lightning and when we head back to that pad view you can see over at the pad it's still looking pretty good so awesome uh i'm gonna hit a couple more of these we've got yolk tesla uh saying merry christmas to all and to web a good flight very nice oh my god very nice um let's see we've got uh martel dube saying let's go jwst fly safe uh eric raymie thanks for covering this historic launch thank you for that support uh greg dietz saying merry christmas to all go chris go nasa space flight go jwst and don't forget ariane 5. uh let's see we've got a few members here thank you to uh to vason i will say for becoming a pad rap member simon meyer say or becoming a red team member uh d dever also becoming a pad rap member and uh thomas moffer or malford saying thank or becoming a capcom member thank you so much for that ongoing support uh like i said we would not be able to bring you coverage like this uh without that support 100 and i'll i'll say it again for those of you who have joined our broadcast since then thank you so much for all of your support and your trust in us this is why we're here because of all of you and and because of the not just because of the work we do but because of the trust that you all have in us so thank you yeah chris could could you ever have imagined years ago that you'd be in french guiana with a headset and a camera talking about any rocket any any launch from there much less james webb no i mean i i i have said for years and years and years that i wanted to be here for webb and that i would try and find a way to make it possible and i am still absolutely floored that i am one of only 20 media members in the world who got access wow pandemic only 20 media are here wow no kidding yeah tell us about that trip how how uh how how long did it take you to get there uh so all told um it if you do it all in one go it would take about 26 hours total from florida to get here to french guiana and i know a lot of people are going what yeah how does that you know quickly pulling up google maps and going no it's not [Laughter] so here's the thing french guiana is an overseas territory of france so you have to go to france from the us basically to get here um there are a couple of other ways to do it that are more securities and it takes a little bit longer but the easiest way basically is you go to either at you go to either atlanta new york or chicago and then you go to paris and then you get on an air france flight and you come here um i i shout out to air france who thought that two and a half hours was enough time to land at one paris airport get through customs get my bags get an hour across the city to the other airport to get back into to get back through security they thought that was an okay thing so basically what you have to do is you have to have like a day layover in paris to get there because there's only one flight in and one flight out of here a day on air france oh wow so it it it it takes a lot to get here so like basically if they launch today um my flight out of here is this evening but i do not arrive back home until just before midnight local time in florida on the 27th wow so yeah takes a lot to get here it takes a lot to get here well hopefully we can get you home before the new year because if that happens that means that uh this launch has occurred yes indeed and actually i like this comment here uh andrew r with a super chat saying uh chris g chris g's return flight fund hopefully we can afford to fly him back [Laughter] appreciate it it's not like a lagrange point it's pretty easy to get christy back afterwards [Music] true true all right are we what are we looking at here we've got a uh got a a satellite view of the launch pad here yeah yeah i mean and this is where it is i mean that is french guiana and you know you can see i mean it's it's a long way to travel when you have to go all the way it's like an eight and a half hour flight to paris and then an eight and a half hour flight to here um so it's it's a long distance but yeah that is the that is the ariane 5 launch pad that we are looking at right now on uh on google earth and um at any point did you look and see like if it were possible to go straight from florida to french guiana how long that would be uh no because it's not possible you have to paddle like yeah all right uh let's see let's get back to some questions i know you know people probably don't want to hear us yammering on about flight stuff uh attila beregi saying uh and this might be for hagen here uh is jwst gonna be able to see sagittarius a better man what we've seen i actually have not thought of that um it is interesting that would be awesome i mean as far as i know we don't actually look at sagittarius a right don't we just measure the stars orbiting around it is am i remembering that right yes because we can't really see it in a way so yeah for those who don't know a is a supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way galaxy right yes now i will say that it is possible that astronomers may want to do infrared observations on the maybe on sagittarius a or like you said on objects or stars orbiting around it but um we haven't gotten anything that tells us specifically that they are looking to do that however it would not surprise me if they do all right now i've got a question for the two science writers in this on this broadcast right now because as someone who has worked on designing spacecraft and the way they are pointed i have a question about the james webb sun shield because that shield has to be constantly facing towards the sun to protect the rest of the instruments and the mirror and things like that so how much freedom does the spacecraft have to point itself at various objects for observations really good question it has it has a fairly large degree of movement because the sun shield is huge um uh the sunshine will ultimately be like 24 meters in diameter um when it is fully deployed so it's relatively huge compared to webb's 6.8 diameter primary golden mirror now that said just like hubble basically what you have to do is you have to time your observations of specific objects based on where earth is in its orbit around the sun so like if you were trying to look at let's take a constellation to make this easier if you wanted webb to look at the orion nebula well webb can't do that in the middle of july because the orion nebula is aimed at the sun it would have to point itself with sun but it can then do it for a few months worth of time in the you know northern hemisphere winter southern hemisphere summer so that's sort of the the trade off there like webb is able to sort of like go oh i need to move 20 degrees this way to look at this i need to move 15 degrees this way to look at that it's capable of doing that but it can't like spin itself around right because part of what the sun shield does is not just keep it it's not just cool it passively to 50 kelvin at first it also helps um just it also helps block some of the scattered light from the sun as well chris correct me if i'm wrong but um because james webb will be at l2 it will constant earth will constantly be on its night side when looking at earth from web that is correct yes basically webb will always be looking away from earth yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna jump in real quick with uh why didn't they just put it in the shadow of the earth like why do they need the sun shield and why can't they just put it in the shadow of the earth if it's always the earth is always between the sun and uh james webb i know it doesn't quite work that way right no well no it's it's a great question um because so and to understand this you need to think of total solar eclipses so the sun and the moon appear to be the exact same size in our sky and that's why the moon can actually block the entirety of the sun just perfectly so we can see the corona and everything like that so if you could put james webb at right that point where the earth and the sun sort of look the same in terms of size well that would be the orbit of the moon um and then you're not in this stable lagrange point you're not where you actually need to be to actually conduct the mission that you need you would still be in earth orbit and then you'd be spinning around the earth once every 28 days so that is why you can't just put it in the shadow it does raise the point though and something that has been brought up as designing a telescope to be landed on the far side of the moon and actually using that as an observation point um that's something that's been proposed and could very well happen once we uh kind of ramp up the launch cadence to putting things back on the lunar surface but uh not what james webb is doing though also i do want to before we get back into some more questions uh nasa ken has just reported that the green the board is i was able to say the greenest board geez it's still early in the morning guys give me a second the board is green weather is currently not an issue and no technical issues as well everything's still on track for liftoff in just over 37 minutes if you're just joining us we are still are weak nasa is still targeting a lift off along with ariane space at 7 20 a.m eastern time or 12 20 utc for the james webb telescope on ariane 5 all on track right now oh that's music to my ears it really is it really is and oh man oh go ahead sorry i know like um for me personally i haven't even been covering james webb for nsf but for just about two months now um i think it's worth noting that nsf has been covering james webb for a while and i keep saying to myself that i can't believe that this is actually happening but for chris especially being down there i can't believe i it's hard to fathom that this is actually happening it is and and you know i'll i'll start with what you just said and then i'll transition into something else um to talk about here but um you know yeah like i mean like you you've you've been covering it for the last few months for us i've been covering this for my entire professional career for 13 almost 14 years now um with nasa space flight but there are people who have literally worked their entire careers engineers technicians scientists who have worked their entire careers on this telescope and scientists who have helped design it who will not get to use it because it it took 25 years to develop it took 25 years to get the technology to this point where we're ready for this and they they won't reap the personal benefits of this it will be the the new astronomers who and the younger astronomers who will actually be using this telescope and you know it is really fascinating that there are people who literally spent their entire careers just on james webb and here we are now already ready for its next step on the next great leap of its adventure it's um it it it is incredible absolutely incredible and it's fun i still don't believe it's real and we're under an hour like i think the moment it's really going to become real is when you hear atoncion donsla ddo por launch count finale right and then they start counting down in french like from 10 like i think that's the moment it's going to become real for me is when you hear oh my gosh we're at t minus 10 seconds wow yeah so so so what you're saying is if if we're able to get a a good if we're able to get the rain to clear between you and the rocket and you're able to track that we shouldn't be too surprised if there's a little bit of shake just from from nerves right i don't think i think the clouds are going to handle it yeah the clouds look basket it'll look like a perfect track because it'll only be a couple seconds just don't move the camera we'll see a bright light and then it'll go into the clouds yeah that's pretty much what it's going to do yeah we want it to go into the clouds we want it to launch so yes we want an empty launch pad an empty launch pad and a james webb on its way up yes all right let's let's uh let's try to hit some uh technical questions some of these have been sitting here for a while um and and this one i um i don't know it maybe they're kind of joking around but i i like the spirit of it um does it give us the ability to see other living beings like how how close could we look at an exoplanet okay i'm really excited about this but hayden you go first um okay so one of the big things that for me personally that i mean this is why i love james webb um james webb is going to extensively research exoplanets and star systems um out in the universe that are not our own and even with hubble we have gotten fascinating results on exoplanets um for example um around the pds 70 star system a few months back new research was announced that gave proof that we found a moon-forming disc around one of the pds-70 system planets and that was from hubble and you have to remember that hubble's mirror is 2.4 meters in in diameter and james webb's mirror is 6.5 meters in diameter so james webb is going especially with james webb being an infrared telescope it's going to allow us to see a lot now if that means seeing living beings i'm not too sure it depends on it depends on if they have infrastructure if we can see that infrastructure but i do not think that we'll be able to see living beings walking around on another planet um but it's worth noting that james webb is going to allow us to extensively research exoplanets and really characterize them in ways that we haven't been able to before and exactly that and like yeah not not see like i don't think we're going to be like oh and there's the warp trail captain you know uh you know but one of the reasons the mirror is so big on webb is because we want to sample those exoplanetary atmospheres because we know what we've done to our own planet after the industrial resolution we know sadly what those telltale artificial signs of a developing civilization are if that civilization is following a similar evolutionary track to us in terms of technology so one thing we will be looking for with web is do we see evidence of artificial greenhouse effects on planets because that would indicate that something might be there will webb be able to definitively prove yes that planet is inhabited no but what webb can do is go that planet is inhabitable so basically we could live there if we went there based on what we know of its atmosphere but is it actually inhabited it's not going to be able to tell us that with with a like finite degree of certainty unfortunately webb is listening in the wrong frequencies to pick up like alien episodes of i love lucy correct yes and and i i know that one of the ways that we study um exoplanets now is we we wait for a planet to pass in front of its star and we can sort of measure how uh measure the photons that are passing through the atmosphere now with with james webb being infrared does that give us any extra capabilities any tricks up our sleeve more like a more like you've moved to a different part of the toolbox okay if that makes sense um uh because there are things that that like we said at the beginning that web is not capable of doing that hubble and spitzer and other telescopes are capable of doing um it's just a really really really big infrared but infrared can tell us a lot right and it can help us do that spectroscopy of atmospheres exactly what you were saying like the photons that make it through the atmosphere and then we can tell which ones didn't so that tells us what blocked them basically um that that's more of what it what it's going to be able that's more the bag of trick that it's got is that really really like ah so that's 20 oxygen three percent nitrogen you know like it can start to really dial in what the atmospheric composition of these planets are but the other really cool thing about web is you know it has to be able to see back to basically almost the beginning of the universe first light in the universe it has to be has to be able to sample exoplanets and it also is going to look at things in our own solar system too so i mean it's got to be able to see present day all the way back to the formation of the universe it's an incredibly complex vehicle yeah yeah really quickly chris while we were talking there everybody look in the upper left hand corner of the screen because we are less than 30 minutes oh my goodness we've just crossed under the 30-minute mark if you're just joining us if you're wondering what's going on where the nasa space flight team bringing you live coverage of the launch the attempted launch coming up here of the james webb space telescope live from french guiana down there actually chris gebhardt our assistant managing editor is there on scene we've got our own video feed uh out there there's a helicopter hovering in that feed they're tracking the leopard yeah i looked over all of a sudden i'm like wait that's not james webb that's a helicopter hovering but apparently security out there as well and uh we've got fresh military yeah yeah french military is responsible for the protection of the land rnc assets here in uh at the guiana space center and as soon as you said 30 minutes they all took off and they are on their way out to uh do their final patrol of the beach and uh see to make sure that the beach and sea assets are clear for today and there are other members of the french military in the jungle french the guyana space center is occupies about 720 square kilometers of land and the french military is at very key locations throughout the forest making sure that there are no intrusions onto the base today good deal that's again a lot of things have come together it's it's not just clearly the telescope and the rocket but getting a rocket uphill takes a lot of effort so thanks to everybody for here thanks to everybody for joining us here for our live coverage remember we're able to do this coverage because you all show up so if you're over here you like this sort of thing make sure you subscribe to the channel there's a little button you can click you know where to click if you want to get back to a youtube channel if you think this is the sort of stream you like i think there's a button for that as well it looks like a thumbs up click help some other people find it we're also doing a bunch of social media stuff so if you see a tweet or something like that with a link to the stream you know toss a like on there do a retweet there's just a lot of different ways that you can get involved and help spread the christmas cheer this morning because we're all excited to see a potential launch of the james webb space telescope a long time coming now down to 27 minutes and 30 seconds wow music musical wolves wanted to know does aryan 5 have an h minus 20 vent no she does not know yeah i was pretty sure the answer was no on that one but i like the question i i i don't want to um yeah i don't want to spend too much time on super chats but i just can't ignore charles uh gill ugly saying no question just wanted to help with the travel cost 100 bucks that is just crazy we thank you so much for that support and then uh just a little bit ago a few minutes ago uh bent straight with 200 super chat oh my goodness uh it it's been a while since i've contributed i'm glad to see not only dos in uh an fg what is that uh not me chris gibbhart down there uh yeah i'm supporting him remotely we put together but it's chris gebhardt that's down there yeah uh but yeah thank you guys so much for that support it's it's just incredible that you guys would show up much less uh throw a few bucks our way that is uh much appreciated and it will go to good use so i i actually have something that we should probably talk about here um so thomas do you want to walk us through um like the final few moments of the countdown for an ariane 5 because we're not actually going to see ignitions in the t-minus count and this is very different from other rockets that we have observed yes absolutely so what we are kind of more used to seeing is that the t0 or just the zero mark in the countdown is timed to uh lift off of the rocket the moment that the rocket actually leaves the pad and begins moving first motion which is not how the countdown worked for an ariane 5. it's also actually not very common for most international rockets outside the united states russian rockets have a very similar countdown whereas the t0 or h0 or whatever the whatever letter they use as their designator is timed for main engine ignition so at h0 or t0 on your screen is when the volcano ii main engine on the core stage of ariane 5 will ignite and then about six seconds later is when the solid boosters ignite and the vehicle will actually move away from the pad during that six seconds if for whatever reason something is off nominal with the managed ignition the flight can still be aborted in those seconds um however the the liftoff is not timed for t zero it's time for t plus six about um because that's how long it takes the engine to reach full thrust and then the boosters ignite uh once the health of the main engine has been verified so that is a slight difference that we'll see when we get down to the liftoff man i can't believe it 24 minutes oh no all right uh let's see uh i like this question uh sunuru sand saying is it possible to expect great results soon i can't wait for some kind of breakthrough and then in a similar vein uh cameron mann saying how long will it be before we can expect some deep field imaging so uh how long yeah how long until we start seeing some science okay so let's okay we're gonna back it up a little bit so james webb launches today um it's going to take about a month 30 days around that around that to get out to l2 during that entire trip to l2 james webb will be doing deployment so that by the time james webb is at l2 if all has gone as expected james webb will be fully deployed whenever it reaches l2 whenever it reaches l2 it will then begin cooling because some instruments do have to cool in order to begin operating and instrument teams will begin calibrating their instruments and bringing them online so that we can start getting our first science so currently the expected the it is expected that about six months after launch we can expect our first results however if there are issues with deployments or calibrations or bringing instruments online it could be longer than that yeah and part of that calibration that you were talking about there uh hayden you know we talked about the sun shield and so when the sun shield is fully deployed it will be able to cool the observatory passively with just that shield down to about 50 kelvin but webb needs to be incredibly colder than that um webb needs to be at six kelvin just six kelvin above absolute zero um so uh in order to do that they have to use a cryo cooler this is a joint effort between nasa and the european space agency and this cryo cooler is what takes months and months and months to cool the observatory down so that the infrared detectors can actually work the way they're supposed to so yeah that's why you have not heard a date that's why nasa and esa and canada are not really talking about when we can definitively expect the first images and everything from web because a lot is just so dependent on how this goes over the next over the next four weeks and and what is and what is also true they have actually not been able to test the cryo cooler on earth in its ca in its entirety they have been able to test the part of it that is on the spacecraft the satellite bust so to speak and they have been able to test the part of it that is on the deployable boom but because of how web had to be put together they were not able to test the whole thing fully integrated with the telescope so there is a risk there how many individual actions have to take place before the telescope is fully deployed 344 and hayden what are the exact numbers on how many of those are the single point failure of things let me pull up the article real quick to make sure i don't mess up anything okay so during deployments there are going to be 344 unfolds so james webb is going to be unfolding 344 times 307 of which which is about 87 of those 344 are critical single point failure areas which means that if any one of those 307 critical single point failure areas if any of those unfolds fail then the mission is over there's nothing we can do we're not talking about that right now right yes this is not a conversation of discussion next question but this is it's interesting though because this really just shows how complex the sun shield is 225 of those 307 critical single point failure areas are in the sun shield itself wow which is very scary but also extremely impressive all the emotions with this um and worth noting that those systems have been tested pretty expensively here on the ground yes it's every year yes they have extensively tested that deployment sequence in its entirety yes and it's worth noting that um i've talked to a lot of people about this telescope for articles and such and i think just about every single person that i've talked to has said that they're confident in the test that they have that they have done with this vehicle and that they're confident that it will perform as expected okay so we've we've talked about how uh how the telescope has to always be pointed away from the sun now before that sunshield's deployed do they have to make sure to keep the mirror pointed away from the sun or and also in the future what if for whatever reason um control was lost and and it started to you know tilt on its own and and what if sunlight were to shine onto the telescope what would happen is that mission critical tell me tell me about that uh i think the i think if i understood your question correctly um it's more of the thermal concern there because the sun shield is very critical in keeping webb cool right the cryo cooler does the rest but like if the sun shield were not to deploy the cryo cooler cannot cool the observatory to the temperatures that it needs to so uh that that to me is how i would answer the question if if it if we lost attitude control of it and it started to aim itself toward the sun it would end up most likely end up being the thermal things that that got that get it very quickly and and so right it needs to be super cold to be able to perform its its mission because it relies on infrared it's not a matter of like oh we just got too much sunlight and now we just burned out one of our instruments it's more just like we just need to keep it super cold that's the biggest part of it yes yes all right just trying to understand and and hopefully asking questions that maybe other people might not have thought of um where are we i see we're at t minus 17. this is fine right everything's fine everything's fine ever just focus on the animation focus that animation is so soothing look james webb is just out there it's in its operational orbit it looks so good that that's you know that's all we need to look oh man indeed uh okay let's see uh see we're within 20 minutes and we want to get to some more uh technical questions and stuff but right now i think maybe uh you know if you want to show a little support maybe have something to show for yourself uh maybe have a a cup of joe while you watch these early morning launches we have a store for that kind of stuff it is uh shop.nasaspaceflight.com and uh you can go there get maybe get you a hoodie for wintertime get you a t-shirt uh all kinds of stuff we've got well more specifically we have james webb merchandise it's true yeah we have james webb merchandise yeah um pauline and mark worked really hard on a couple of james webb designs the gold i love this one don't talk to me until jwst is deployed um that's my personal favorite uh if you want that in coffee mug or t-shirt form i think that's what we'll all be uh saying to uh spouses walking into offices in the next 30 days they're deploying tension rod 500. um [Laughter] do not talk to me before james webb space telescope is deployed like oh that's good yes and then we also have our golden mirror time machine courtesy of pauline acklin making that design yeah um but yeah wonderful james webb merch uh i don't know if you want to talk about a little bit more dos there oh no i just for special events like this we try to come up with something that's sort of memorable it helps support us with the story i mean of course we make a little money that we can roll back into the broadcasts and stuff like that the coverage that we bring to you but we also try to make something that would be cool and this is the sort of shirt that if you know you know you could wear this like you know through an airport or something like that and if somebody saw the shirt they'd be like that's james webb and you could make an instant friend um so we have a couple things like that in the store i really love the time machine design and of course the snarky coffee mug but across the board if you pick something up it's a way to support the stream and also have a little bit of cool merch swag whatever you want to call it so we appreciate everybody who supports this whether you're just here hanging out whether you buy something from the store dudes tons of super chats we could never keep up with all the super jets but however you support us thank you so much all right okay yeah so we do have uh some more like technical type questions uh interstellar 13 saying uh how far will the james webb actually reach and i'm assuming they're talking about like how far can it see uh so webb can see all the way back to first light when the very first stars and galaxies were beginning to form in our universe um so that is give or take the 13.3 to 13.5 billion years back in time is how far this telescope will be able to see which is not the record the record goes to kobe um which actually saw the remnants of the big bang um but that is how far webb will be able to see today well not today eventually today right now right now please deploy the ferry just opens up and web starts looking around ah and it looks like we uh instead of the rocket camera there at t minus 14 minutes they've switched us to some live views of missions i actually want to talk about this real quick this is good this is good i am right outside of that you like run into the shot and wave like i wish i i wish i could uh don't do that but but um i am actually on uh when you see the vips all rush out at like t minus one minute onto the balconies i'm one balcony above them so we are right here at the jupiter control center today all right so we'll get uh again we're not in control of that feed there y'all that's something that nasa is actually sending us and we got the rocket feed there but just briefly we had also some mission control shots oh there goes that helicopter again doing probably yep chris uh i do believe that the uh yep the uh the last expected weather report was green oh yeah keep saying stuff like that there we go positive thoughts all right uh jacob kerman uh asking can jwst also produce images in the visible spectrum like hubble's deep field for example hagen what do you know about that are we going to be able to actually see photos uh even though they're you know they'll be taking them infrared but are we going to have like images on the same order as hubble or is it all just going to be like red oh hagen is muted or not go ahead chris it's um they're not going to be the images like hubble no but they will be processed in a way where like we're going to get pictures right but it's not going to be the hubble visual images that we are used to they're going to be infrared so like like when chandra when the chandra x-ray observatory sends back its photographs right you're seeing the x-ray light well when james webb sends its back what you're going to see is the infrared wavelength and they're not the visible wavelength will they like colorize them to make them i'm pretty sure on public affairs people will yes um yes okay uh okay b flying says is uh james webb solar powered yep in fact that is the first step of the deployment sequence and the only one that will get pretty much today is solar array deployment um and that it is going to come right about 33 minutes after launch um and that is the that's the first deployment step is to get that solar array deployed so that the spacecraft can get power positive that's the really the only major deployment step we also get a mid-course correction burn about 12 and a half hours after launch which is at the depending on your time zone also today but that is much farther after the initial ascent from solar array deploy and something that's worth noting too is that um the solar array deployment is the only time critical deployment on james webb all other deployments although yes they do probably have a timeline to follow when deploying they can take as much time as they want when deploying it so if they start deploying the sunshield for example and they see that there might be a slight issue in the deployment sequence they can stop evaluate what's happening and you know think of what to do next they aren't gonna they don't like have an hour for this deployment and it has to be done by that hour um so yeah yeah and i think that that's part of why you know nasa and esa and csa have been really hesitant to release a detailed timeline of webb's deployment for exactly that because they've got it planned out in 15 minute increments over 30 days and exactly what you just said if you stop because you just want to double check something that's not the story right the story isn't oh my gosh something's gone wrong and it's delayed the story is this is the most complex telescope we have ever built we have never done anything like this before we have a plan for how it'll go now we have to see what that reality is you know and yeah it might take 35 days it might take 40 days it might take 60 days to get it fully deployed but you know what if at the end of the day it's fully deployed great i don't care how long it took yeah i don't care speaking of plans you know how long it is until the planned launch less than 10 minutes now oh man so business end of the area and five countdown begins at t minus seven with start of the terminal sequence oh boy and again if you are just joining us the weather has been confirmed green with the most recent weather briefings so weather has cooperated and there are no technical items being worked the board is green for the launch of james webb that synchronized sequence starting in just two minutes and that's chris gebhardt's view right there he is on the scene down in kuru um on one of the observation balconies he traveled all the way down there to see this launch and you can see the the four towers there in the middle of the shot he's about 12 and a half kilometers away which is uh where we were going for this but and what you see on the right hand side of the screen you see the big cylindrical thing uh to the right of the four towers yeah that is the water tower for the ariane five launchpad oh is it gonna overflow it like two minus a couple minutes i wish there's a water cannon on top of it though oh no wow and am i seeing just the very tip of the fairing or is that the the yeah okay there's like one tree that we needed to visit with a chainsaw but uh the jaguars kept us away from that and tristan can pack a chainsaw so something about not being allowed to carry that on an aircraft we were good to get the batteries through security i didn't think we would we should risk the chainsaw uh here's a here's an interesting one uh from thomas slav saying uh is signal processing performed on jwst or is raw data sent to earth ooh interesting raw data yeah back to earth yes all right um franco's saying can can jwst aim itself or is it always looking at a fixed position i think we sort of touched on this earlier right yeah it can aim itself uh to a certain degree again we were talking about how that sun shield needs to stay between the main instruments and the telescope and the sun but there's room for movement there and there's you know several degrees of freedom for pointing at various imaging objects also the james webb telescope will time its observations with what points in the sky it can look at at any given time of the year based on the orbital position of the earth and the sun but yes it can aim itself at specific points for observations all right um and i really like this one too herbs m is jwst going to search for that predicted ninth planet yes they will be able to use james webb to search in the infrared for the signature of the proposed planet nine yeah it's actually it's it's it's perfect for that job right because of because of the infrared um as long as they give it a good place to point out we we need to know where to point it first right [Music] well yes and no um it could be used to search for it it's not ideal for it no it but it can be used to search for it the one that would actually be ideal for trying to find it is the upcoming vera rubin telescope okay um which is still a few years away but web can be but it's not ideal for trying to find it now if we do find it we can aim web at it yes but in terms of like using web to search for it it's not really ideal for that okay gotcha uh see mesum and naderi saying how much speed does james webb have so how yeah how fast will it be going once it's in position it'll be basically the same speed as earth right because it's well yeah because it's just going to be well no it has to be going silent oh man this is a very weird question because you're not in earth orbit so you kind of have to answer it in relative to relative right yeah like relativity terms yeah like like relative to l2 it's not moving it's in l2 right relative to earth it's not moving but relative to the sun it's going around the sun and it's doing it in the same 365 and a quarter day period that earth does only it's a 1.5 million miles farther from the sun than earth um which is where the l2 earth's stun point is um you know what so we are on the launcher really five five minutes sorry currently [Laughter] we should go through a preview of what you will see in the final minutes of this countdown at t minus seven minutes the synchronized sequence or basically what we would call at american rockets the auto sequence has started already started back at t minus seven minutes we're into that now and the onboard computers are handling the last few minutes of the launch countdown we just got a glimpse of those cryogenic arms which are going to retract a few seconds before launch those are topping off the tanks on ariane 5 with those liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and that first main engine the volcano engine on the first stage will ignite at t minus zero at t plus six seconds assuming the engine is operating nominally those two solid rocket boosters will ignite and begin james webb's journey into space we'll hopefully see a pitch down range chris will be tracking it we also have the official camera feeds coming in and uh there is a cloud deck so we'll have to see how long we see it but james webb will head out east from the guiana space center will stay to keep an eye on booster separation as the next event a couple minutes in the flight and then that corsage actually burns for a fairly long time it's a pretty big stage and it burns hydrogen and oxygen so it's a nice long burning stage and then there'll be one upper stage burn prior to spacecraft deployment the fairing separates after the boosters separate and before the two stages separate so we'll have james webb exposed to the vacuum of space at that point and then once state separation occurs and that one upper stage burn is complete we will see james webb deployment less than 30 minutes after liftoff and that will complete the ascent phase of james webb's journey to the l2 lagrange point and will be followed shortly after by solar array deployment as the one deployment thing we're expecting to see uh shortly after launch we are just about three minutes away wow and i'm gonna hand it off to you guys in the studio and get ready to track this i will see you back on comms after the liftoff you will hear my scream don't worry enjoy the show chris and as we're coming into the last couple minutes i just want to thank everybody for joining us today there's 88 000 of you out there watching along with us and uh we couldn't be happier to have you here uh i mean we'd be watching it you'd be watching it you know i mean this is one of the biggest uh missions what what was the debate the the the biggest mission since what sts-61 if you people if you do not know anything about space you know about the hubble space telescope and so given that web is its successor i we have some of us have agreed that james webb is the biggest launch since the first hubble repair mission so for some context there that's how big of a moment this is we are just about two minutes away from the beginning of another journey like hubble this time it's james webb folks this is what we do here on the nasa space flight channel if you want to get back to streams like this you like our different style of commentary you know how to you know how to get back to the channel like and subscribe turn on notifications go outside don't go outside to watch the launch just watch it here everybody there can go outside um and remember your likes on the stream get james webb into space i'm kidding on that that's not a real thing but uh the more the more people that sort of click the more we're helped out here so that we can help share this event t-minus one minute and 30 seconds with the rest of the world thank you all so much for letting us do this and to what thomas said this telescope is truly going to change astrophysics and astronomy forever so this is a very very very big deal so godspeed james webb good luck to nasa esa csa and arianespace absolutely and folks quick uh housekeeping here when we come down to around t minus 30 seconds we are going to cut over to the official nasa commentary so we are going to let you all listen to the actual call-outs from nasa we are all going to we're not going to be quiet but we're going to mute our mic so you can't hear us because we'll all be squealing if this thing goes but less than a minute now and just expect us to be more quiet which is difficult for us to do sometimes and expect to get that nasa commentary coming up here t-minus 30 seconds and counting by for terminal count this nerf width set starting rainforest to the edge of time itself james webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe punching a hole through the clouds 20 seconds into the flight good pitch program reported [Music] vehicle performance is nominal [Music] call me on rocket cameras come on the ariane 5 rocket continues to fly uphill in nominal fashion [Music] the rumble of the powerful ariane pipe now being felt here in the control center 3d animation [Music] we can hear the noise and feel the vibrations here you're right rob yeah impressive 13 altitudes seven kilometers downrange traveling uh about 0.6 kilometers per second the trajectory reported to be nominal by jean-luc voyeur the range operations manager you can see at the bottom of your screen the yellow line is the trajectory plot perfectly overlaid over the green line which was the pre-launch trajectory that's gonna be wow oh my goodness james webb this telescope is on its way to lagrange point to oh my gosh anybody have any thoughts how are you feeling at this moment i hey we're off to a great start and everything is nominal at this point you can see that trajectory is dead on the pre-launched uh performance prediction so vehicle is performing anomaly so far we're coming up on booster burnout and separation as our next event so let's take a look we are squinting at that green line the little graph that's moving across at the bottom middle of the screen there and they were talking about that showing the stages of course that's an animation on the top but we believe based on what they said that that is live telemetry and it is going right down the track so i am squinting down to 2010 watching that little x move on the line because we want that to stay right there's the predicted track and then the actual track and hopefully that thing is just straight down the middle everything looking great so far look at this yep you can see they had a successful booster separation and first stage flight is continuing nominally chris how's it going well i'm in tears that was incredible well we have had booster separation i saw i saw i know a lot to go but that was just oh that was a moment to watch and to feel that vehicle lift off was incredible oh wow payload fairing separation now and we can confirm payload fairing separation has occurred it has yep oh yes james webb space telescope is now exposed to the vacuum of space oh wow okay we need to talk about that for a minute they had to modify the payload fairing for this i didn't want to say this ahead of time they had to modify the payload fairing to add extra vents to get even more air out of it because web is so big that they were afraid of a pressure wave payload bearing separation um actually reconnecting with the telescope so they had to do even more hey really quick we're looking at an onboard view of the james webb telescope onboard ariane 5. oh my god that was super rude of me but you know something that's a camera wow oh and that was a view i'm sorry that was a replay of payload fairing separation oh wow no way so we do have a camera on the rocket looking up not sure if that was exactly live or if that was looks like it was just a few seconds delayed it's delayed yeah so i don't know if that's like latency or what it is but wow 170 kilometers in altitude almost 400 down range now traveling just about three kilometers per second now coming up on that point yeah well into space but not yet at any orbital velocity uh of course we're not really going for a parking orbit or anything we're going straight for an ascent all the way to the lagrange two point but everything a nominal so far we're still in stage one flight the next milestone will be shut down and stage separation uh we've got a little bit longer to go on that first stage burn still yeah the first stage burns for about eight and a half minutes um per the timeline yeah and then longer than some rockets take to get to orbit period i know right and then man but then that upper stage takes over right away and will burn from eight and a half minutes to 25 minutes after wow it is an incredibly long burn of that second stage and it is the east esd is the upper stage the evolved cryogenic stage d is the one making the flight today of the upper stage excellent i i don't i don't want to read too much into the illustration here but it almost looked like we could see uh the boosters sort of pitch up there after the the sides separated and that sort of works towards this is as they try to get a little bit of fighting against gravity there and they have this longer burn on the stage and then that is a i'm going to say ridiculously long burn rocket scientists will be like no that's the barn that's needed it's not ridiculous that's just what we need um but everything's still looking great straight down the middle of that green line there you see the trajectory flying east from south america it is more or less flying due east that is the lowest energy required trajectory to get out to the lagrange point it's effectively an escape trajectory looks like we were looking at uh with ground stations there i think we had a couple of ground stations on the map yep so unlike um unlike a lot of american rockets which communicate up to satellite networks during liftoff the ariane 5 communicates with a series of ground stations across the atlantic and in africa perfect nice perfect trajectory good wow everything nominal at t plus seven minutes again about a minute and a half to go on this first stage burn and then that'll be followed by a nice long upper stage burn to get james webb on its trajectory but everything nominal so far you'll actually start to see the vehicle is starting to flatten out it's mostly about achieving that horizontal velocity now so the altitude will actually start to slightly decrease a little bit because the rocket is mostly focusing on just going really fast sideways um you can kind of see the trajectory finding out and even dipping down a little bit that's as expected that green line is the expected trajectory and the yellow is the actual trajectory that the rocket has followed and everything that's matching so far over a thousand kilometers downrange now from the launch site almost five and a half kilometers per second go ahead chris you know you know i'm just very interested because i you know gosh there's been so much tension and everything building to this moment i didn't know how it was going to release for me yeah i i am just in tears watching this not because i'm like not because i don't understand what still has to come but this is just incredible like this yeah this is my emotional release from all of this yeah yeah oh i can only imagine what the engineers that have worked on this for so long or feeling right now and what's insane is that this is just the beginning we're about to get so much from this mission yes yeah the stressful part is still to come yep all right coming up on stage one shutdown and separation here shortly you can see it marked on the trajectory near the bottom there this is the last major staging event prior to payload separation there is stage one shutdown and stage two ignition the upper stage of ariane 5 has ignited and we are into the final burn of james webb ascent go baby go there's a little pitch adjustment there right right after ignition stage two guidance starts to converge yep we saw that so this is the lung burn this burn will last continuously until about t plus 25 minutes um on the clock on the upper right hand side of your screen this is a very normal normal i said normal i'm [Laughter] this is a very normal process this is about how long for every single mission that it does the only difference is web is light enough that instead of shooting the vehicle into a geostationary transfer orbit it's shooting it onto the 30-day transfer orbit to the l2 lagrange point and that loss of altitude if you are just joining us that loss of altitude is expand the upper stage is not a very powerful in terms of thrust but is a very powerful in terms of efficiency stage and the way you do these types of ascents with those stages is the first stage will throw you up way higher than you actually need to be you'll then actually use gravity to your advantage to help you gain some acceleration and then eventually that altitude will begin to climb again so this is very nominal don't panic that you see it going down this is very nominal for how the ariane 5 flies and of course we've heard nominal trajectory call outs across the board here today yep they bought themselves some time there they got a little bit more altitude and that gave them time to accelerate onto the velocity they need to continue on to the l2 point so that is a normal thing now we're trading that altitude for some time as they continue their acceleration i've done that in kerbal exactly exactly it's usually on accidents i i went up a little too high with my altitude and i'm like i think i can angle back down and gain a little speed you have a sometimes you have a more efficient upper stage that has a little bit lower thrust to weight ratio and so you try to gain yourself that time you sort of loft up a little bit and you can try to counteract gravity a little bit by changing the way you're pointing your engine exactly but that's that's exactly what they're doing here another one of the interesting things that maybe some of our newer viewers may not uh know about is uh this launch pad is pretty close to the equator um so uh thomas you want to tell them why like what kind of advantages you get from launching from so close to the equator yeah basically uh the earth is spinning and it is spinning faster at the equator than it is closer to the poles and so if you happen to launch from the equator into an orbit that is going eastward such as an escape trajectory like this or a near escape trajectory um but it isn't a skipper character my apologies because it's this unearth point anyway when you are need an orbit that requires as much energy as possible such as these deep space missions you want to take advantage of that earth spin you start with some extra velocity basically and this is why french guyana was selected as the launch site for europe's space program obviously you can't really launch east from europe because well there's other people to the east of europe so you want to watch out over the ocean or out over some uninhabited desert if you're in russia or something like that um so french guiana was selected not just for the ocean nearby but also the fact that it is nice and close to the equator that is also why florida was selected by the primary united states launch site for those orbits because it is about as close as you can get uh from the intercontinental united states um and it's all but it differs from polar launches when you actually want to be closer to the pole because then you have to remove less energy to get into your polar orbits um so it depends on the mission but for these missions going to deep space launching from near the equator basically you start with extra speed uh which makes it easier for the rocket to complete the mission there you go and i think you just saw in that little animation that it has passed out of range of the natal tracking station and i didn't quite get which one that was uh that's not communicating with ascension it's communicating with the ascension tracking station right now on ascension island so um moving across the ground track there and across the communication network for as it moves across the atlantic toward africa and you can see it's going to start increasing altitude here again very shortly and then it's going to pretty much permanently increase altitude all the way to the l2 point we had a little bit of a mascot on the screen there for a minute i saw that yeah what was that what is the final altitude does anybody know off the top of their head what what is the altitude of that lagrange point where it's going like how 4.5 million kilometers yeah yeah five million and they're beautiful go ahead chris it really has it's been i was just going to say the same thing it's been beautiful ariane 5 is working exactly as she should be there is approximately 11 minutes remaining in this burn uh of the stage and as we've said it is a near continuous propulsive phase the only time of the ascent for the ariane 5 that there isn't propulsion is those few seconds when the main cryogenic stage shuts down and separates before the upper stage takes over and it went on their bingo card this morning the fact that it actually launched there at the beginning of the window had that just over 30 minute window but right on time just as scheduled remember the work that goes into making these things happen y'all that uh well you know i i i gotta say too you know like to to the ion spas people have been wonderful to us because of the holiday that it was they took us to dinner last night for a traditional like christmas eve celebration and there were a lot of people there a lot of people there including nasa bigwigs dr zubukin was there stephan israel was there and the general sense was everything seemed to be aligning like we didn't want to count our blessings just yet but it really all seems to be aligning to this morning and off off she went right at the opening of the window and speaking of off she went i think we have a replay and this was right about the moment i screamed oh my god it lifted off we have that on the audio i know we should have that recorded on the camera so that may appear on twitter somewhere later that is a gorgeous view chris wow yeah yeah that's incredible and she's actually a couple different cloud decks there yeah yeah yeah yeah you actually got to follow for a little while yeah oh and to hear the crackling of big large solid rocket boosters again yeah it's been a minute for that hasn't it chris been a long while since i felt that that was we're hoping that we're gonna feel that again next year maybe yes yes in a few months hopefully and the roar of an rs25 oh oh just one that'd be weird that'd be weird yeah four rs-25s but things still going very very well you can see teams uh so this is the uh this is the mock at the uh space telescope institute i believe um watching over the data monitoring web as the liftoff continues uh as the launch continues here um there are a lot of spacecraft operators just monitoring web making sure that you know what they were expecting to see in the data transmissions back from it is what they're seeing right now um and then they will be watching of course at um as as it pops off the top of the ariane 5 and then we will get confirmation through them via nasa that the solar array has deployed and you said thomas that's about 35 after launches solar panel deployment 33 minutes 33 okay and an interesting fact is as we as we continue to wake since we've got so long here the so there's the control center here in the jupiter control center where you see those feeds right it's where you see you know stuff on israel brief brief reporters and brief the media it's where you see all of these people sitting right now this is not actually the team that controls the arion 5 during the countdown that is actually a team station in a bunker yes a bunker four kilometers from the launch pad so while in the us we have seen a huge move away from bunkers to more remote mission control and launch control centers it is still a bunker here um for the ariane 5 so there are about uh 75 people in a bunker waiting for the all clear that they can that they can get out of that and the weather people too are in a bunker about five kilometers from the launch pad a little bit closer than five kilometers from the launch pad as well so the weather officers also have to shelter in bunkers during ariane 5 and vega missions nice you can really see that altitude starting to increase there in the uh continuing to watch the little graph that's now trending very delightfully upwards shows the predicted track like where they need it to be and where it actually is the little x there that continues to follow looks right down the line there hey i heard chris breathe right yeah i think that was the first breath i've taken in 19 minutes about 19 18 minutes or 50 seconds like wow oh man hey oh go ahead thomas let's just say again everything is nominal at this time we're still in that upper stage burn and uh we've got just under 10 minutes left on this burn and that'll be the the final propulsive maneuver prior to spacecraft separation so everything on track so far where's where does the upper stage end up uh on the same escape trajectory um but because they will use webb's uh onboard propellant and on-board thrusters to do coarse adjustments to actually aim it precisely where they want it at l2 the the ecsd upper stage will most likely miss the l2 insertion point and just end up in a heliocentric orbit around the sun interesting um yeah so sort of like the same way how like the the upper stages of the of the uh of the atlas fives right when they launch landers at mars they don't hit mars atmosphere they miss mars because you aim a little bit off of where you want to go so that you don't end up doing exactly that have accidentally putting a piece of junk where you need to be observing right um how do you feel about uh hitting a couple questions we're we're about what five minutes or so from uh second stage cut off uh yeah let's let's do this um okay chicosy or chigozi says uh why is it looking back in time can you explain the physics behind it oh well kind of um it takes you know it's the speed of light basically um and the further i mean it's basically that i mean you you're you're capitalizing off of this weird um off of the weird space-time continuum thing um of how long it takes light to travel and and what you can see so yeah i mean it's basically like you're aiming it in uh you're aiming it and you're just trying to to see as far far far far into the distance as possible and the farther into the distance you go the farther back in time you go is how that works right one of the interesting things here like like we were talking earlier about oh you know will james webb help us detect alien civilizations and stuff like that and that's one of the tricky things because it takes time for that radiation to get from them to us the light whatever we will be looking into the past like we said we called it a time machine because by the time it gets to us anything we detect may be long gone yeah even within our own uh within our own galaxy we're talking about thousands of years in the past depending on how far any given star is away from us yeah yeah yeah the our galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across yeah yeah when when we look at that and when james webb actually observes these things it's going to be capturing something that has been traveling towards earth for thousands millions of years that's that's why we refer to it as a time machine yeah uh all right i think this is a pertinent question here otis nunn saying how long after long they actually said lunch um we always like that correct how long after launch can you uh say it was successful oh wow uh well so it depends on what you're calling successful the launch is successful once the spacecraft has been separated into its nominal trajectory um you wouldn't call the deployment successful until it's at the l2 point with all of the antennas and sun shields and everything deployed separately you wouldn't call the mission successful until it has started conducting science operations like what are you calling successful i think that's i think you've answered it perfectly because there are there are different different points that you would call successful but uh i think the ultimate question is like when can we be like take a huge sigh of relief and james webb is operational and conducting science i think that's the ultimate question yeah which i think i i think i think however the biggest sigh of relief is going to be when all of those 307 single point failure unfolds are done yeah i think that is a moment of just everyone on that team will take a moment to just go oh you know yeah it worked it did it you know we got through you know everything we poured our hearts and souls into worked yeah yeah and it's it's a relay race right launch day is the big exciting thing but remember everything that had to go to get to launch day and then we've got these 33 minutes where it's launching and we've got to get out to spacecraft separation and then once that separates an entire other team starts taking over the next steps all the unfoldings and deployments and activations and cooling down and everything that has to happen it's not like you get there and james webb hops off the top of the rocket and it's like great we're right start the science um there's still months months of tasks to do before it comes fully online so you called it a relay and this reminded me that one of the reporters i met down here we heard him and i were talking about it earlier um this week and i i described it to him as a relay race where you're passing the baton off to yourself nice and and he thought that was great and said you should say that on stream and i totally forgot until you said relay dos but there you go hey happy to help i say a lot of things [Laughter] coming up guys we are coming up on stage two shutdown by the way this is again the end of the stage two burn coming up here shortly oh my goodness and there it is stage two shut down so coming up next thomas is i mean separation of james webb oh my god it's gonna separate that's great so it now has about enough energy to make it to its final destination like chris was saying it it's gonna perform a couple burns on its own uh but for the most part it has the energy that it needs and it's still so close to earth that's that's uh i guess the power of the ariane fight you can take a look at that altitude is just climbing rapidly even though the engines are not firing right now this is coasting upward with all that momentum the engine just gave it and you'll see the velocity is decreasing because obviously it's climbing in altitude so gravity is pulling it back down and decelerating it of course it's got enough speed that it will get all the way to the lagrange point but instead of falling back down to earth or anything but that altitude is climbing and that you're trading the kinetic energy of velocity for potential energy in the form of altitude it's just like going outside and throwing a ball into the air except the uh the arium5 is a lot better at throwing a ball into space than you are you can actually assume no air resistance when you do these calculations exactly there you go um so it is now it's it's slowing down we know that it's going to do that because just like you throw a ball up into the air it goes up and it starts to slow down and then it stops and comes back down again but in this case it's not going to come back down again it's going to go up to that point where the gravities are balanced just right and it's going to give a couple little puffs from its thrusters hope that's not underselling the work of the thrusters there but uh and it'll go up there and hang out at the l2 point i think i'm holding my breath again yes yeah we're getting close to deploy right here we may be out of range of those ground stations that brought us that uh forward-facing camera where we could see james webb before not sure if they're gonna cut back to that or it should be within range of the melinda tracking station off kenya yeah let's see if we get that live video here that's what i'm hoping for the previous clip was like a few seconds delayed too and there it is separation confirmed the james webb space telescope is free flying in space oh my gosh what they did look at mystic control uh ariane five [Applause] [Music] the james webb space telescope amidst applause here in the mission control center now taking its first steps in pursuit of space on its way to the l2 point of course we will stay here waiting for that confirmation of solar panel deployment which is the first critical deployment of the mission oh here we go here we go ah this is on board camera a replay from the ariane 5 upper stage i feel your gray artifacts i know how it goes look at that look at that wow [Laughter] there goes webb that is the southbound end of a northbound space telescope y'all look at that i can't believe it wow look at that oh with the earth oh oh man wow i i just to anyone who is watching our stream right now who worked on this project no matter what you did on this project i hope there is at least some sense of relief that part one is done i know there's a lot left to do i know the real business end of this begins now um but i hope everyone does have a smile on their face right now knowing that web is in space and on its way to its location absolutely i know i do yeah oh gosh yeah so we do get one more kind of risk retiring moment here as we're coming up on solar point and there it is solar ray deployment confirmed i was going to say i hope it stays in the shot because it's it's soon afterwards that the solar array was going to deploy and this the upper stage camera caught the solar array deployment there and look at the sun hitting it look at that 343 unfolds to go look at look at this shot y'all look at the sun with the comment of the stream [Laughter] look wow that is of course the first very critical thing the thing almost every spacecraft does upon separation is they immediately pop open those solar panels to get power positive because web has been on battery power since a few minutes prior to liftoff so getting that vehicle power positive is always the first step once you reach orbit or space in this case since web is actually not in orbit right now i mean technically it's orbiting the sun along with earth you could argue it well it's always an orbit of something let's put it right look at this i wonder if this is like a a status of the telescope sort of monitor that we're looking at there i mean there's mirrors yep this would be the uh space telescope institute the mock well i see green on one board so that's helpful yeah yeah don't don't try to read into this too much might not even be in english good point well actually that's nasa that's probably in english but yeah wow they have a lot of michael setups there again folks t plus 31 minutes after the launch of the james webb space telescope all the way up not just through spacecraft separation from the upper stage the ariane 5 rocket there but also we saw that solar panel deploy which is a critical step in the mission like thomas said and uh this is the guy in the hawaiian shirt looks happy i love that shirt yeah oh man um so so did they did they deploy the uh the solar panels early or is it just is the 33 minute more like that's when solar deploy will be that might be when it like fully latches or something like that i was looking at a nasa timeline but um basically there it's there's not it's an approximation of t plus 33 minutes obviously it doesn't happen instantly so clearly uh solar array deployment has happened though so that that's what really matters oh family members wow oh man this is nuts can you imagine the feeling of relief like everybody in the launch control room here the launch center just massive they're like i'm going home i gotta take a nap yeah to ariane's space let's just take a moment to aryan space what an incredible accomplishment for them today their part ariane space is part of this is done um yeah uh you know now it's the handoff to nasa the canadian space agency and esa but to ariane space massive congratulations on yet another successful flight of the ariane five so congratulations all around there in mission control and at some point we might get my my favorite view here but this is more important right now i'm working awesome thank you chris i mean heck we may have to upgrade my favorite view there for because for a minute we saw a view of the upper stage with no spacecraft on it there you go we're gonna need a bigger camera yeah right oh man this is great i mean yeah because they i'm sure that you know i don't know maybe there's some housekeeping they still have to do but i mean their job is done they get to take a load off call their family wave at the camera yeah yeah and for many others it is just beginning you know i said it in our in the run-up to the launch and i'll say it again the launch was the first step on web great leap to what it's going to show us here and um that step was massively successful um and and before we get too far out of this thank you to everyone who tuned in to our broadcast and watched us and participated in south america there are the teams the mission controllers have done a fantastic job it was an utterly flawless launch from the european spaceport here on the equator in the amazon rainforest hoping to go over now to nasa administration we're going to hear from nasa administrator bill nelson here quickly so we're going to go ahead and listen into that that is the administrator of nasa speaking after a successful early ascent for james webb let's listen in all stations seven and a half minutes give or take until the sequence continues with our um adir release part one and our tcs configurations well at least they said they were going to so maybe we come back to that yeah never mind sorry go ahead chris yeah i just just again thank you to everyone who who joined our broadcast there's still a little bit to go here but um yeah thank you so so much for for the support for the trust and and for the trust thank you so much it means so much to us here yeah yeah the fact that you would you would choose to watch our stream at just that means the world i mean there were over a hundred thousand of you watching live with us and here i want to i want to hit a couple a couple super chats some people being super generous today uh jacob knight uh throwing 200 bucks at us saying keep up the good work exciting time to be alive um there was uh where was it uh wb hokie saying merry christmas and happy holidays to the nsf team and family super appreciate all that y'all do the stream is always professionally casual making it easy to share with anyone and everyone also for the memes when unfold hey how's it going oh man that should have been the shirt we came up with when unfolding with an origami telescope right like yeah well that's a good way to talk that's a good way to describe it oh yeah that's so it's a really good way to describe it we did an entire a museum show because i do the shows with intrepid museum and we did a james webb focused show talking about uh james webb and origami and different ways that we could fold some if we had like stem activities where you could fold your own origami and then we talked with an engineer that had worked on james webb about how james webb unfolded and how similarities to uh folding paper helped them decide on how they could fold james webb wow yeah well you learn see you always learn something on our streams i just learned that chris i'm i'm wondering how you're going to be able to or when you're going to crash out here because this is a yeah oh gosh i've done this i've seen you know falcon heavy launches and stuff like that you're there and there's so much energy and there's so much excitement and it builds up and it builds up and then it goes and it doesn't instantly just dissipate it's still like there the tension is still sort of there but at some point you just come crashing down you have a very good sleep this might be the first time i actually sleep on an aircraft um tonight um yeah but yeah my flight is out of here uh at 6 pm this evening oh wow um which i would have delayed had we not launched today um but yeah my flight is out of here at six o'clock this evening so um i might actually sleep on the flight back to paris yeah yeah it's just you you get this feeling and all of a sudden it's not right away it's you get back to the hotel and you've up unloaded footage off the sd cards and you've done this and then all of a sudden there we go here we'll hear some words from nelson thank you very much this is a great day not only for america for our european and canadian partners but it's a great day for planet earth thanks to the team you all have just been incredible and over three decades you've produced this telescope that is now going to take us back in time it's a time machine it's going to take us back to the very beginnings of the universe we are going to discover incredible things that we never imagined and isn't that typical of this team where the impossible comes possible i can't thank you enough on behalf of a grateful united states government i can't thank our our partners in europe and canada enough the french launch team the ariane spas the flawless uh perfection of the vehicle and now we have to realize there there are still uh innumerable things that have to work and they have to work perfectly 344 of them but we know that in great reward there is great risk and that's what this business is all about and that's why we dare to explore the james webb space telescope is very much a part of that exploration it's significant that we had the delays and it kept us all the way to today christmas day when others long ago peered up into the sky and saw stars but it's uh also another millennia before that that a shepherd grazing his sheep would look up at the night sky he became a poet and he penned the words the heavens declare the glory of god the firmament shows his handiwork that shepherd that poet became king and those immortal words in psalm 19 encapsulate the expressions that we have today the handiwork of god as we peer back in time over 13 billion years ago capture the light from the very beginning of the creation my congratulations to the team my congratulations to nasa to our partners go james webb space telescope god bless you and god bless planet earth back to you katie wow well there you go so we just heard from nasa administrator bill nelson following the successful launch of the james webb space telescope again spacecraft was successfully separated from the upper stage of ariane 5 and successfully actually deployed its solar array the first step in its deployment sequence um the next step is a course correction burn in just about 12 hours so for now i think we're all just breathing a sigh of relief that the earliest phases of flight have all been nominal and we're off to a really good start yeah and i think oh here we go here's our bad shot my special request of me um my favorite shot on launch day again 12.5 kilometers a day but this was chris gebhardt's view from the guyana space center down there in french guiana remember chris gebhardt our assistant managing editor was there in person because you all keep showing up to these streams and uh that is my favorite view at t plus whatever on a launch day just off in the distance peeking across the jungle there coming through some of those low hanging fog and clouds you can see an empty launch pad we've got a successful launch of that james woods space telescope aboard the arion 5 and that is what i love to see any day anytime it's launch day and we can look at the pad at t plus something and the rocket's not there what we're looking for and i believe that is gonna bring our live coverage to a close uh thank you so much again for joining us uh for all the support and and just uh just being interested in this stuff i mean it it excites us so much uh just just to be able to cover this stuff but the fact that y'all would tune in uh that's just incredible uh i am stephen maher i'm one of the photographers and occasional commentators here on the streams i've enjoyed being with you and also with me down in french guiana in south america real close to the equator uh chris gebhardt thank you so much for traveling out there uh especially during a pandemic uh we really appreciate you going down there and uh and covering this for us it was my absolute pleasure and still is and uh now all i've got to say is i really hope our remote camera worked yeah singular remote camera right one remote camera yes one remote roll in the dice it worked yeah there was it was it was a space limit right it was it was in terms of like how much you can take all right well cool so so definitely make sure you're following uh chris g on twitter and of course the uh nasa space flight main account they uh they will be retweeted by that um also joining us today john doss galloway thank you so much for joining us today das hey thanks steve this is uh a lot of work even for us a lot of work went into bringing you all this coverage today but real quick i'm going to say thanks to chris gebhardt down there again because let's talk about how much troubleshooting had to happen uh to get chris's audio and video coming live from french kiana chris thank you so much now no thank you for like putting up with me as i go like okay you're gonna have to explain that again what do you want me to do it's a magic no but it took a lot it took three days of technical troubleshooting yep to get this to work yeah yep yeah so just thank you thank you so much chris for heading down there and taking the time to share this with the rest of the world um it's it's amazing to me that we are able to do this and it's it's humbling to me that so many people show up when we try to share something that we think is interesting that people think that they want to see so thanks everybody for watching today all right and also uh one of our writers here at nasa space flight hagen warren thank you so much for getting up early and joining us here on the stream thank you guys for having me um it was an honor uh my first stream with nsf happened to be the launch of james webb so pretty nerve-wracking but i think it went well godspeed james webb and yeah all right and then also we've had uh thomas berghardt on stream with us one of our regular commentators thank you so much for joining us today thomas always a pleasure glad to see james webb flying free glad to see this telemetry coming down through nasa goddard as it makes its way to the l2 point and uh hope everyone has a very nice holiday and rest of your 2021 what a fitting end to the 2021 launch campaign with such a historic mission getting off the ground uh thank you everyone so much for watching we really appreciate it and does anybody have the actual link to this because i'm sure people are going to want to check in on james webb as it uh ascends towards the l2 point um yeah that link in chat yep yeah get that link in chat you may just be able to google where is web because that is the title uh as far as i can tell the title of the website and also uh behind the scenes pulling levers and hitting switches we have had michael baylor doing a great job with the production today uh thank you to michael uh and don't forget to uh download his app next space flight which will tell you when any launch around the world anything we have info about he's gonna put it up there on his app and that way you'll know uh when where what time what it is all that good stuff and with that i think we'll go ahead and close on out if you haven't already hit that subscribe button on your way out the door and thank you so much for joining us this morning and happy holidays [Music] [Music] normal pressure looks good [Music] yikes you bet we don't need any more these

Channel: NASASpaceflight

Views: 2,007,322

Keywords: spacex, starship, boca chica, SN4, testing, wdr, wet dress rehearsal, bocachicagal, elon musk, live

Id: 5rARTOhbLDg

Length: 144min 26sec (8666 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 25 2021