NASA's $10 Billion Time Machine

say hello to the most incredible and complex space observatory in history the james webb space telescope with a hundred times the observational power of the hubble space telescope webb can peer more than 13 billion years back in time due for launch this halloween webb promises to help solve some of the greatest mysteries in the universe i'm very excited today to be talking to heidi hamill who's the vice president of the association of universities for research in astronomy as well as matt mountain who is the president of that association uh thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us it's a pleasure to be here it's a great pleasure to be here we always like to talk about our coolest telescope too well speaking of the coolest telescope james webb space telescope i'm sure it will be no surprise to you uh that you know when i interview space uh scientists of fields as disparate as exoplanet research in our own galaxy and you know the cosmic horizon of the early universe i asked them what they're looking forward to and they almost always say james webb space telescope it is definitely a highly anticipated project and um it's going to be very exciting once it's launched hopefully later this year if we could just uh begin by uh you know an overview of why this telescope is so important and what's new about it james webb space telescope is a new kind of telescope uh it's going to be focused on the infrared part of the spectrum so it's it's not quite a successor to hubble it goes beyond hubble and it complements what hubble will do um when i talk about it i usually say there's three things about it that are super special one is a lot bigger than hubble the mirror itself composed of segments is about six and a half meters across compared to hubble's two meters so it's bigger than hubble it's colder than hubble and that's important and when we we joke a lot about how cool it is um it's cool not just because it's a cool science thing but it's literally going to be a cool telescope because it's designed to look for infrared heat from the universe um the sort of the heat from the very first galaxies and stars that formed um it works in the in the thermal part of the spectrum hubble works it visible like what we see with our eyes so it's bigger it's cooler and it's further than hubble hubble's in a low earth orbit this telescope will be at the um the sun earth lagrange 2 point which is about a million miles away you can do a straight line from the sun to the earth and go another million miles that's where we're going to be putting james webb space telescope mostly to keep it cool uh to use big sun shades to block the sun to block the warmth of the earth and the warmth of the moon and that coolness is what's going to allow us to explore the heat of objects throughout the whole universe so i mean the way to to think about this is when we used the hubble space telescope we looked deeper and deeper and went further and further back and saw these amazing galaxies and if you look at these very deep galactic fields that hubble has taken they get a bit more orange and a bit more red and then they sort of run out and you go oh we run out of galaxies the answer is no because the universe is expanding it's pulling space apart it stretches the wavelengths apart and moves it from the optical to the infrared so james webb was originally designed to capture those longer wavelengths heat radiation because that's where the earliest galaxies are sitting because the universe has stretched so far they're so far back you know with the universe the the further the deeper you look the further back in time you are looking it's a time machine so so james webb is the ultimate time machine and so we're hoping it will reveal this whole class of galaxies that basically have vanished from view from the hubble space telescope and could you uh kind of spell out explicitly why it needs to be so cold cold in order to capture that kind of light so the um it's roughly at um minus 380 degrees fahrenheit so it's really cold um and because the um the signals from these very faint galaxies and as we'll talk about these um exoplanets are very faint and what normally happens if you're looking for heat you've got to make sure the telescope itself isn't what you're seeing you want to see the thing beyond the telescope and so the things we look at are very faint and in fact just to give a sense of how little heat we can detect we can actually detect the heat of a bumblebee on the surface of the moon if you could have bumble bees on the surface of the moon and that's how faint we're having to go if you're going that faint if the telescope was warm it would be like looking through a a bright searchlight looking for something and you want that light the infrared light to go away if you've got to cool the telescope so the universe and these very faint objects of the thing you see not the telescope itself so two points i want to make though is that we aren't actually going to be looking for bumblebees on the moon another thing about this this uh this extreme cold everything about this telescope is designed to optimize it to sense this infrared light from distant galaxies and other objects in the universe and so that's why this telescope looks a little bit different than classical telescopes you know for example it's got this big golden mirror sitting out there in outer space there's no tube that contains it like like hubble has hubble looks sort of like a a bust you know it's the the mirrors hidden inside we don't have that on web because that tube and the supporting structure would be warm and we would overwhelm our light from those distant galaxies also the reason it's gold is not because we want it to be expensive but because gold has very specific emissivity properties that reflect this infra infrared light very very well and so that's why it's the shiny gold mirror that's sitting out there in space and then the big sun shields are there to block the warmth from the sun and the moon and the earth they aren't like a single layer they're multiple layers and each layer reduces the amount of warmth that gets transferred so that you have a we call it sometimes we talk about um spf sunscreen right like we put 50 on right the spf of the sunshield of web is about a million right how much it cuts down on the warmth from the sun so everything about this telescope is designed to optimize that infrared light but because it's so big we've had to fold it up right and we can't launch it and so we have to unfold this sunshade which is the size of a tennis court and gently pull it apart and it's like five layers of space blanket we've got to pull it apart a million miles away from here automatically and then we unfold the telescope and with its gold coatings and it looks out away from the earth and the sun and the moon at this very cold part of the universe that we're trying to detect so it's going to be a somewhat hair-raising operation as we start unfolding this telescope since nobody's ever built a telescope this big before yeah certainly and you know i want to pick up that thread but also get back to some sort of space fee uh content just because one of the things i love that about the james webb is how just aesthetically pleasing it is uh these honeycomb the little um beryllium mirrors and things and um like you mentioned this very magnificent sun shield and just the size of it the complexity of it it just looks so different and i'm not throwing shade on hubble but it looks like a regular space telescope around earth right yeah and this is just so unique so could you tell us a little bit about the um design process for this the kind of challenges that had to be overcome in order to create something with these types of specifications well since matt is uh yeah matt you're you're project optical scientist you think i'm i'm the telescope scientist so i work on the telescope side originally okay it was it was you know um it was a very interesting process trying to come up with the final design and so forth because first of all we realized it had to be bigger than fit in the rocket and so the idea that we'd use these segments together uh and uh because we tried this on the ground telescopes like the keck telescope which is a 10 meter telescope and we know segments can be made to work each segment though has to operate at this minus you know 300 degrees fahrenheit right so the first problem was how do we make mirrors work at that temperature but we can when we have to make them in room temperature so we actually had to get the mirrors polish them to the right shape and size to very high precision you stretch the web right out across the whole mirror by the way if you imagine a 6.5 meter stretched across the atlantic ocean the largest wave that we allowed is roughly about an inch that's how smooth the final mirror has to be so how do you do that was was actually the problem and so we started by looking at the individual segments where you make you polish them all up and then you do crazy things you cool it all down and it distorts a bit you measure how much it distorts and then you polish the inverse distortion in so when you cool it again it will bend to exactly the right shape and the first time we heard about this one okay this is a little crazy but because we use beryllium it works really well and so it's called cryo polishing we basically polish in the distortions so as it cools it bends into exactly the right shape and then we'll unfold all these mirrors and then each mirror has a little actuator so we'll adjust them in space to get them just about right we'll look at some stars and we'll line them again and then each tweak each little actuator until eventually we get this incredibly smooth mirror surface which is equivalent to having a wave no more than an inch across the atlantic ocean so we're going to make sure that we don't have a repeat of the hubble issue where that was the single monolithic mirror yeah and when it launched you know its shape was what it was and that's the shape we can adjust the shape of jwst so you know this complex process that matt has described gets us to we think as good as we can do but we still have that final capability of being able to adjust in real time and so uh that that gives us a lot of confidence in in how we're going to be able to to make this work and not have a lot of confidence a lot of confidence that is really clever i love the uh the you know the way that you approach that challenge i mean that's just fascinating and the uh the helpful metaphor of the atlantic ocean really makes it the mind-boggling of it yeah yeah absolutely so when it launches um what's going to happen uh in terms of it getting to the lagrange point and uh how long will that process of unfurling it into its final form uh will that take well heidi knows that when they first uh put the curiosity rover on mars they talked about the seven minutes of terror we're unfortunately into about three or four weeks of terror this thing as it flies out it gets launched the cowlings all fall off it starts going out to this l2 point and as we do that we've got to then unfold the sunshade and bring that out the problem is once you've got the sun shade out guess what happens it starts cooling really quickly so now we've got to start unfolding the telescope pulling out the secondary getting all the optics lined up and then start up the instruments but that the way i wave my hands it's not it's going to take two to three weeks to get that done properly we have a very complex plan uh for how this is going to happen and there are you know stopped points along the way where you evaluate according to plan if so we move to the next step if so then we move to the next step one thing i wanted to share um with listeners is that um this telescope like matt said takes a couple of weeks to get through that whole unfurling and opening and getting ready for science but even then um we have a lot of brand new pieces of equipment cameras spectrographs and we have a very complex choreography of how we turn certain instruments and certain modes on at certain times in the right order in the right order exactly because some of the instruments are used for the the pointing and tracking of things and other instruments or not so things have to be done in the right order and the bottom line here is that um once we go through that we have to make sure all the proper modes are working my takeaway is that we're not gonna launch this thing and then next week have pictures for the public or even next month have pictures for the public it's probably going to be closer to six months before we have gone through all of these checkouts and um verifications that everything is working fine before we really start executing the science programs that matt and i and the other team members have devised so you know not that we're superstitious but they all have to operate flawlessly for this mission to work and that's why we've done so much testing on the ground to try to make sure that happens because it's a one shot we have to get this right once that's it so it's fair to say for a couple months after the launch there may be uh among the james webb team some elevated pulse rates some vital signs that are a little bit like more attuned because it's a very true statement yes absolutely yeah watching kev and then as a big team we'll be looking everybody's gonna be looking over his shoulders because none of us can afford to make any mistakes you know yeah yeah absolutely but it's a well-trained team a lot of work has gone into planners we do rehearsals we are rehearsing in virtual space how to do this at the moment that's right and we even rehearse um things that might go wrong so that everybody's ready for that not that anything will go wrong um but you know we just want to be on top of things so there have been a lot of rehearsals going on we really try to think this all through ahead of time think of all the possible things um to be prepared for whatever would happen matt since you're a specialist on the exoplanet side i'd love to know how james webb can tell us more about these worlds that are orbiting other stars so you know it's uh it's a james webb was not designed to do this originally and it has just fallen in our lap we didn't even know there were many extra planets when james webb was first conceived but because it's so stable because it looks at the infrared and it's so big we've realized that if you imagine this is the the sun and the planet moves in front of it we'll be able to see the little ring of atmosphere shining through and by looking at the light before the planet goes through and after taking the difference we'll actually see what's in the atmosphere of these exoplanets assuming things are lined up properly there's a whole group of people really interested in this interestingly enough it's a real shift and heidi is very aware of this the guys who study james webb look much more like me you know rather grayer male the people who are actually leaving this exoplanet science much more like you you know there's a real shift in demographic where there's a bunch of women leaders coming out and becoming real leaders in the field and so we're seeing our fields change with the web and because the science that's really quite exciting to see that you know it's you know it's um the old white guys are having to hand over to a much more diverse much broader scientific community to to lead in this exoplanet era so that's actually pretty exciting too it's been fun for me to watch that as a woman in sovereignty that's an older kid my my background is both astrophysics and also planetary science and when i started doing astronomy of planetary science you know 30 years ago that was a new field we were exploring the solar system for the first time and so we saw the beginnings of demographic shift that matt's talking about where far more women were coming into the field of planetary science because it was brand new and you didn't have any of the old structures and now it's fun to see that same shift continue but more focused on the astrophysical community as this whole brand new field of exoplanets opens up and there's just so many opportunities it's wonderful to watch that change so it's not only a diversity of worlds that we're finding we're also including many more people into the study of that and that's just fantastic you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 1,764,877

Rating: 4.7877722 out of 5

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020, james webb, james webb space telescope, space telescope, NASA, hubble, hubble telescope, astronomy, telescope, outer space, space show, cosmic horizon, aliens, matt mountain, association of universities for research in astronomy, AURA, gold telescope, astropsychics, arianespace, ESA-CSA, rockets, exoplanets, heidi hammel

Id: pq_aV5hy7Bc

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ptreee]

I really, really hope the rocket makes it into space

[u/Baige_baguette]

And by the looks of that thumbnail we will also be able to destroy the ones that we do find with the telescopes destructo beam!

Good news though, can imagine this will have some really exciting finds in the near future.

[u/DoubleDThrowaway94]

I am so excited for its launch. I’ve been following this thing for at least 15 years now.

[u/MistaBig]

I should say, "known" exoplanets. This telescope will undoubtedly find more, and it's 10 billion, not 4. Dammit

[u/allisonmaybe]

Can it tell any sure indications of life with atmosoheric composition?

[u/TheOriginalFireX]

I'm confident this is the first telescope to see an alien bio signature.

[u/Tricky-Appointment38]

I am more excited for this than anything else right now by far. I’m probably going to shed a tear when it sends back the first images

[u/_Sidewalk]

Finally an actually decent post

[u/bottleamodel]

does that mean it will be able to detect the presence of industrial civilisations as a result of atmospheric analysis?