So it's Monday, the 9th of January 2023, and I'm on my way to the University
of Leicester first thing in the morning. All over the weekend, the James Webb
Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have been observing the planet
Uranus for us. Now this is a really exciting moment
for us. It's the first time
we've turned the telescope at this particular target, a real test of the capabilities of the telescope. Yeah, well, they're working away, so I'm hoping there'll be a nice little show
and tell for us. And my emails have been trickling
in, even as I've been walking, telling me that more data is available on the archive
for me to go and take a look at. So it's going to be a very busy day, This is our first glimpse of what the data might actually look like and as we keep going longer,
wavelengths will get better and better. There we go. That is Uranus. Look at the black. nest there is where we think
we were pointing. And actually
we've got it pretty much spot on this. Then if I scanned down all of these lines
just here, they're real. They are uranian spectra, there’s Ethane and acetylene produced
high up in the stratosphere. Hey, Leigh Hi, Naomi. There we go. Hey, good morning. I understand
it's bright and early there in Seattle, but can you see yourselves now on screen? Yes. Yes, we can. Okay. So what I will show you is the one of the best wavelengths
for MIRI I've been able to get. What wavelength is it? Look at the spectrum. Oh my word! Darkest regions that we're confident about. Wow. I can even see glimpses of the rings in these data. What else do we have? There we go. Even better. The rings around Uranus and some hot spots
at the North Pole just there. So this is our first glimpse of the data. And I think we can all be extremely happy
with this this is just so fantastic to see this. You know, it's it's been a long time
coming. But, you know, every every moment
of those 25 years that we worked on that has come to fruition
with this amazing data set. And I thank you to you and your team for spearheading this
and putting these the proposal together. Yeah, observations of these data,
I mean, they're just fabulous. I agree with you. This is going to fundamentally change
our understanding of of Uranus. And then when we get Neptune
data, it's it's going to be the whole ice
giant paradigm is going to shift. So it's just fabulous. So thanks. Thanks. Yeah. My name's
Heidi Hammel, and I am one of the six interdisciplinary scientists
for James Webb Space Telescope. I started working on the JWST project
before it was JWST nearly 25 years ago, before
it was even a formal NASA project. We called it
the Next Generation Space Telescope. And so I became involved in the project
because I wanted to be able to use this fantastic asset to study objects
within our solar system. And that's challenging because they're bright
and they move quickly through the sky. Are planetary
objects move so part of my role with with the JWST project for the last 20
plus years has been to ensure it did have the capability to observe
bright objects and moving objects. NASA's been exploring the solar system for many decades,
since before I was even born. I don't think I can capture
every single mission that's launched. It explored,
but boy, let's talk about some highlights. We started with the moon because we knew
that we would be sending astronauts there. We wanted them to be aware
of what they were getting into. We also, in the early years
sent spacecraft to Venus, many missions to Mars starting with the Mariners
and then the Viking landers. And we've since sent orbiters and rovers
like Sojourner Spirit Opportunity, Curiousity,
and most recently the Perseverance Rover and even a little helicopter
at Mars Ingenuity. Interestingly, when we've been studying
these large worlds like Jupiter and Saturn,
we have found that their moons have been just as fascinating
as the planet themselves. We had the Uranus flyby in 1986
with the Voyager two spacecraft. We had the Neptune flyby of Voyager
two in 1989. Right now, the outer planets
in our solar system, Uranus and Neptune, are the least explored planets
in our solar system. One of the things that I had learned
in the years since Voyager, when we continued to study
Uranus and Neptune with newer ground based telescopes
and the Hubble Space Telescope after it had its servicing
mission. Hubble threw us a few curves but I think it's really a testament to the
whole team that we were able to overcome them and that we have a wide field camera
three in the telescope which will help
to unlock the secrets of the universe. What I learned was that these planets change and that what Voyager saw was a snapshot in time. But the planets today
don't look like that. I use the analogy that it's like if I showed you a picture of me in 1986, that's not how I look today, right? I've changed. And so using only the Voyager data doesn't give us an accurate understanding
of how these planets change with time. And so the need to continue observing them
with ever more powerful tools until we get a new mission there
that has only intensified over the years. Good evening. Welcome to the Space
Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. I'm Don Savage, public affairs officer
for NASA's Office of Space Science. This evening, we're pleased to announce the start
of a week long campaign of observations of the impact of periodic Comet
SHOEMAKER-LEVY nine with Jupiter. The impact of the first fragment
occurred earlier this afternoon at about 3:54, and scientists around the world
participating in the NASA National Science Foundation
Observing campaign, as well as virtually every other telescope and observatory
around the world, have been watching for the impact of Shoemaker-levy nine. My team and I were set up in the Institute
of Space Telescope Science Institute, and for the actual event of the first
impact, we were down in the basement where they had computer screens, where the technicians
normally check the data to make sure everything's okay. Normally,
astronomers are not allowed in there. They don't let people in.
But this was a special event. So we were all crowding in there,
waiting to see the first images and when the first images came,
it was pandemonium. I mean, it was like, what is this? Could this be a moon? Is this a real plume? What is it? Get an almanac check
where Io is But yeah, I have it could be because we had to reduce
the augment a little bit. That one looks pretty good. The fit. And then when the first image
of the impacts like him up we were like, Holy smokes, there's video of me
like pointing at the screen. Everyone around us is, Oh, Jennifer! Look at this! Oh my god. Isn’t that incredible? it’s bright in the methane band. That’s amazing! That’s what we all say at that time
there was a little tiny computer monitor up above the big screen
showing Jupiter. And we could see the press conference that was happening
one floor up in the auditorium, and Gene Shoemaker, Carolyn Shoemaker
and David Levy were sitting there, you know,
not knowing that one floor beneath them everything was happening. And so I said we have to break in. And they said, this is a formal
NASA press conference. You can't break
in. I said, we're going up. That's the kind of person I was. So I said, Get me a computer printout
like anything like this thermal paper. Do you even know what I'm talking about
it’s like this black thermal paper. But you can see Jupiter,
you see the black spot on it. And I said, We're going up TV crews
like she's going up. She's going up because I have to show Gene and Carolyn
and David this. It’s their comet It's not fair. that they didn't know what was happening One floor below And I think we may have some up
to date information from Heidi Hammel. (laughter) I’d like to Introduce Dr. Heidi Hammel. Eugene Shoemaker said he would be
personally astonished if we saw nothing. Well, if we didn't see something, Well, he's not going to be astonished. We actually saw some amazing things. We. We just downloaded the first two orbits
in the first orbit. We were able to see a plume
on the edge of the planet in the second orbit,
which I have a raw laser printer output. This is as raw as it gets. we can actually see the impact site
itself. And I'll remind you, this is for A
the first one, not the brightest one. So we're going to have a really exciting
week. Why be dull and boring about it, Right? Let's just let's have some spectacle. Let's have fun with this. That was sort of my whole presentation
style for the whole week because we have press conferences
every day, like, what do you see? And today we're like, Who knows? You know, what's going to be the big one
hitting tomorrow? What is that going to do? Big Black Eye on Jupiter was my best
guess. The impact of Comet Shoemaker-levy
nine into Jupiter back in 1994 was a game changer
to actually see an explosion taking place on the planet
Jupiter with the Hubble Space Telescope and with other ground based telescopes really changed our perception of how planet changing
some of these large impacts truly were. All of these places
that we have visited with spacecraft, we are really limited in what we can do
with our ground based telescopes. But now with Hubble
and now the James Webb Space Telescope, we are getting new views of all of these
places to supplement and complement the results we've gotten from these myriad missions to all these worlds. And we have a fully
deployed JWST Observatory (cheering) Future proofing JWST was not a problem because what
we set out to do was so ambitious that even over the quarter century
it took to build this thing, we never built anything to surpass it. And then when those first images came out
was like, Wow, it's happening along the way unfolding itself. Deploying a mirror 21 feet wide, a sunshield the size of a tennis court and 250,000 tiny shutters, each one smaller than a grain of sand,
well we can look at everything in the solar system
that's not too close to the sun because we have a sunshade, an umbrella
which protects us, but they only protect us
if we don't look too close to the sun. So all of the planets move around in the sky rather quickly,
but all of them from Mars on outwards sometimes are in the zone or they're far
enough from the sun that we can see them so that tells us when to look
and how to look. The JWST looks in the infrared,
which is kind of like looking at heat. You can do cool things by looking at heat
instead of looking at light, because you can look through the dust
and gas of nebulas and look through into where planets are being born
and new solar systems around these stars. The reason we wanted to use JWST to study
objects in our solar system is that we knew this telescope
would have fantastic sensitivity, and we also knew that it would have
very stable image quality and stable
photometric quality. And those are things
we look for in astronomy because they allow us to get higher
precision on the objects for studying. Now, in our solar system,
we do send spacecraft to some objects, but we don't send spacecraft everywhere. And so the places that we don't send
spacecraft to, we need to use telescopes to study
and having access to the best telescope that we were ever able to build,
which is what we anticipated JWST would be,
that allowed us to dream and plan and think about what we could do with this
premier facility in the solar system. We have two basic capabilities. One is take pictures
and one is stretch out the light of an object into a rainbow to see how bright
is it at each different wavelength. So that's really important for us to do. The chemical analysis and the physical
analysis of what's in the object. In any public talk I give about JWST I always start by explaining what spectroscopy is
because I call it JWST’s superpower. The spectra are so fabulous
that when you get a group of scientists together,
you show them the brand new JWST stuff. And what makes the audience gasp
is a spectrum. It's so good, so clean,
the lines are so beautifully resolved. The sensitivity is so exquisite
that you just see molecules. So we never get to print a picture of a spectrum in the newspaper
because it's too abstract for people. But it's the thing that astronomers use
to know what's going on inside those things that we find as a chemist,
I can tell you the spectroscopy is the best part
about the James Webb Space Telescope. Yes, we're getting fantastic images,
but even even the distant galaxies, you know, the hunt for the first galaxies
of the universe, they are dependent on the spectra, the images
only give you so much information. And without seeing the actual spectra,
you can't confirm the distance of an object or, you know, the pristine
nature of that object. I'm Stefanie Milam. I'm the deputy project scientist
for Planetary Science. I decided to become a scientist
when I was actually very young. I grew up in Houston,
Texas, and I went on a field trip down to Johnson Space Center. When I was about six years old. I came home just absolutely elated
and I told my mom, when I grow up one day I'm going to be an astronaut,
I'm going to work for now, sir, pretty much everything I've done
since that moment has been to become a scientist and to work at NASA someday. I knew that I wanted to become a mission specialist,
so I needed to pursue a Ph.D. But at the time I was working
at an environmental laboratory. Basically washing glassware for a living
to to get myself through school. And I knew that I couldn't
spend the rest of my life doing this. And I asked my advisor,
how can I become a chemist and not have to deal with wet
chemistry ever again? I never want to see another beaker. She knew I had a passion for astronomy
and she said, Have you ever heard of something
called astro chemistry? And that was sort of the turning point. And my laboratory went from, you know, a
room where I was watching beakers to now the entire universe,
studying chemistry of the cosmos. If you would have
asked me when I was an undergrad in Kansas whether or not
I would be working on the largest astrophysics mission NASA's ever had, I would have never imagined it, never. The way the program worked for those of us
who were interior to the program. As part of accepting that work with NASA,
we were given guaranteed time on this new telescope,
especially in the first cycle. And so I knew I had 100 hours
of guaranteed time that I was planning to use
for solar system observations. Heidi came to me and she said,
I really want my time and my projects to go to the solar system community so that they have this data in hand
for future cycles. And they really see
what we can do with data. We see we reached out
to the community members and asked them, what do you think
we should be doing with JWST? What would be unique,
what would be challenging? And we invited them to send little tiny
mini proposals to me and to my team. And so we had a couple of conversations
about what that program would look like. And she she wanted to cover the entire solar system
with her time that she was allocated. And so we broke up her time
to all of the different planets that we can observe, which are the best
use of Mars on near-Earth asteroids, asteroids, comets,
some of the main features of things like the Great Red Spot, Uranus, Neptune,
the outer solar system, all these things we decided that we needed to have
a point person for each of these targets. They would have their own science teams,
but we needed somebody to be the go to that would be responsible for making sure
the observations were planned and delivered and the data was published. The best part of this entire
GTO program is it's very international and that just goes to show
how international this project is, how international it is for astronomy,
for planetary science. We aren't just one small niche group
and two or three people sitting in a room
that are the experts in the field. It takes a whole team
and a lot of that team comes from many different areas
and many different backgrounds even. And all of that helps feed in
and provide the information that we need to really get a grip
on what this data is telling us. Learn something about the solar system
or the universe and ways that we haven't been able to do so. One of the things we had to decide as a science
working group was how fast really were we going to try to push JWST? After a lot of dialog, we decided that the orbit of Mars
would be the the limiting factor, and we looked at
how fast Mars moved in the sky. We said, okay, so that that's going to be our target goal
for the moving target tracking. That would then be fast enough
that it would allow observations of Saturn
and Jupiter and Neptune and the Kuiper Belt objects
which all move slower than Mars. NASA's had a mission called the DART
Mission, the double asteroid redirect test, where they crashed
a spacecraft into the moon of an asteroid. And they were looking to see
if they can move that moon. Part of the observing we decided to do
was try to use JWST to do that. The challenge was that asteroid
system with the moon was actually going three times faster than the upper limit
we had all agreed to in the development of JWST. Huge
thanks to the engineers and the operating team for JWST,
they were actually able to get the telescope to track fast enough
to do that asteroid test. And we did get some fabulous
observations with JWST. So with Webb we get to see things that we cannot
at the present day see from the Earth primarily
that's because of the Earth's atmosphere. We cannot see through the Earth's
atmosphere at some frequencies of light. So what gives us is the ability
to go into space and to look at objects that would otherwise we couldn't
see it at certain wavelengths. Well, particular that's really important
for molecular astronomy, which is what I do, which means that we can see the molecules
in the atmosphere, tell us information about what the atmospheric composition
temperature winds are doing. Obviously we're working as a team
and trying to decipher the puzzle of Titan's weather. One of the things that we're looking at
right now is some of the surface features. Titan has lakes
and seas in its northern hemisphere. These are seas of methane, quite
unlike the seas that we see on the earth. But at the same time,
with some of the same characteristics in terms of rainfall and rivers
and shorelines and this sort of stuff. So we're very excited to look at those
and see if they're still the same lakes and seas
that we're seeing by Cassini. You know, we have a lot of stuff going on. We have orbiters and everything, but James Webb can see Mars
from the whole side, you can see the whole the whole side of Mars and you can map it. And this is something that really
you can do with an instrument available on James Webb. And that has been amazing
because we now we can go and look for molecules like methane,
which with natural gas, that it could be an indicator
of past biology or current biology. That's why we are excited about it. That's why we are working on right now the same thing we can apply to Europe and Enceladus. And you know Enceladus is
a relatively small moon compared to Mars but is like that waiting to see
a little pixel, you know, and something. And then when we point there,
we see a huge plume there. So, I mean, when you see those things
that you really get surprised. This cannot be real. So you go back to the data and then you confirm
that there's a big plume coming out of Enceladus. some of the data hasn't come yet. I'm still waiting for the Neptune
science data. We have a Neptune image
that was taken as part of a program to make some beautiful pictures
for press releases. And boy, did that whet my appetite
for what we will see with the Neptune's Science. Even when we were commissioning
the telescope, one of our commissioning projects was to look at Jupiter just so we could
study scatter light across the instruments and within a single minute worth
of looking at Jupiter, we already knew that we could detect the rings, the satellites,
the bright red spot, the aurora. There's haze, layers. We saw all of that
with one minute in commissioning, already knew this was going to
be a revolutionary telescope.
