Space Telescope is in a way a little like Galileo's first telescope. Wherever Galileo pointed his telescope, he made major new discoveries. Look at the Moon, you find
mountains and craters, look at Saturn, you find rings, look at the Milky Way and you find that it is littered and composed of stars. If you could look back in time, when would you look back to? Early man? The time of the dinosaurs? Or the birth of our planet? We like to say telescopes
are like time machines. And of course the reason
that this is possible is because light takes time to travel. So the street lamp across the street takes a teeny tiny fraction of a second for the light to reach your eye. The light from the sun
takes about eight minutes to reach the earth. So in essence, we're seeing the sun as it was eight minutes ago. Now, a new telescope that's more powerful than anything that's ever been sent
into space is looking at some of the farthest
and oldest objects yet. It's called the James Webb
Space Telescope or JWST, and it can see back to the
beginning of the Universe when the first galaxies started to form and emit light after the Big Bang. One of the great things
about telescopes like this is they're really designed
to see the entire Universe. So all the way to 13 and a half
billion years into the past, all the way to our cosmic
backyard of the solar system, and everything in space
and time in between. Finally, after 30 years in the making, a successful launch into space,
50 successful deployments, 1 million miles traveled from Earth, months of cooling to near
absolute zero and calibration, it has delivered its first, full color, science-quality images. These images showcase the
telescope's powerful instruments and offer a preview of the
science projects to come. These first images really do signify the start of science operations. We have over a year of
observations already planned, some really exciting things
that we already have designed to do in the first year of operations. The hope of scientists is to uncover the greatest mysteries
of the universe today. We would like to observe
galaxies as far away as possible. Red giant stars in the disc of Andromeda. Star-forming regions,
one is in the Milky way, our galaxy and two nearby
galaxies, the Magellanic clouds. The Trappist-1 system, what we can call the
rockstar of exoplanets. TNOs, these are objects that are orbiting beyond the orbit of Neptune. So in the coldest regions
of our solar system. How stars, galaxies,
planets, et cetera formed. And that really helps us
understand how we fit in. So we have all these
very specific questions that we've planned to try to answer. And I think we'll for sure answer those, but I think we'll also learn things that we haven't even dreamed of yet. Lift off with the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope,
our window on the Universe. In 1990, The Hubble Space Telescope successfully launched aboard
the Space Shuttle Discovery. It's been serviced by
humans in space five times, allowing it to be one
of the longest running, and most expensive
science missions to date. For more than 30 years, through
its powerful imaging system, it's changed our
understanding of the universe. Galaxies, nebulae and star clusters have been seen like never before. The Hubble Space Telescope
grew from the idea that by putting an observatory into space above the atmosphere, you
could get much sharper pictures without that blurring that
the Earth's atmosphere brings. So looking at places in our own Milky Way, where stars are being born, and we are beginning to see evidence for planets being born in discs of gas and dust swirling around those stars. Things that weren't even
thought of at the time when Hubble was built, include
measuring the atmospheres of planets going around other stars. And then beyond that of course, the very big picture has
been looking at galaxies all the way back close to the
beginning of the Universe. Perhaps one of the most
well-known images came from what's known as
the Hubble Deep Field. Instead of looking at
previously-known galaxies observed from ground-based telescopes, they pointed Hubble at a
relatively empty part of the sky and took hundreds of long
exposures over a 10-day period, then combined them. This first image changed the
way humanity saw the universe. Almost all of the roughly
3000 objects captured here is a previously unknown galaxy. So Hubble has actually helped
us illustrate the evolution of the Universe from the
first cold gas and dust, which was lying around millions
of years after the Big Bang and how that coalesced and agglomerated and swirled together to form
galaxies full of shining stars. So that's one of the
great successes of Hubble. So to follow on from that science and see the birth of the first galaxies, we need a bigger telescope
and we need one that operates in the infrared and that's the
James Webb Space Telescope. JWST is named after James E. Webb, NASA's second administrator who oversaw the agency's
decade-long effort to reach the moon. He believed NASA had
to put as much emphasis on pushing space science
as human space flight. This next generation telescope
is not only 100 times more powerful than Hubble but its ability to see infrared opens up
a world of opportunities. It means that scientists are
now able to detect frequencies of light that are invisible to Hubble. The Hubble space telescope
operates primarily in the optical. So the wavelengths that you and I can see. But as we look at the most
distant galaxies in the Universe, because the Universe is expanding, those galaxies are in essence,
receding from us at faster and faster speeds. And that means that their light
is shifted from the visible into the near infrared. So in fact, when we want to see the very most distant galaxies, the first ones which ever
formed in the Universe, Hubble can't see them. It's unable to see at
the right wavelengths. And also it's not really big enough to see those extremely faint objects. This shift in wavelengths
is known as redshift and the result is that
the most distant objects emitting visible light are invisible to telescopes tuned to
optical wavelengths. So you need a big telescope
operating in the infrared like JWST in order to see
those very first galaxies, the ones which are moving
so fast away from us, that all of their light is
redshifted into the infrared. Now, JWST's largest program during its first cycle is
going to put those capabilities to the test. The COSMOS-Webb survey is going to be looking 13.5 billion
years into the past, about 200 to 300 million
years after the Big Bang. And what it's going to be
able to do is observe galaxies that are much further away from us than we've been able to do before. So we're going to be able to find some of the earliest galaxies that have formed in the Universe. The Hubble deep field looked
at one part of the sky and stared there for a long time. And that was really our first look into the distant universe. With COSMOS-Web, we are going
to go a big step beyond that, so not only will we be
able to look at objects that are much farther away from us and much deeper into
the Universe's history. We're going to cover a much
larger area of the sky. So we're going to be able to observe many, many thousands more galaxies
than we're able to be seen in the small area of
the Hubble Deep Field. So right now with Hubble at these early Universe time periods, you don't see very many. And what you see is a smudge, just a little bit of a blob. With JWST, we'll be able
to resolve structure. We're gonna learn a lot
about the properties of our very early Universe. How the earliest structures
first started to grow. But JWST will also tell us a lot about how those galaxies evolved from the very early Universe until today, because we'll be able to see
galaxies across a wide range of distances all the way back. So we can put together a
timeline of how galaxies evolve and how their structures
have grown overall. The images are going to
have a very high resolution, which means we can resolve
a lot of structures and see really fine details
that we can't do with Hubble. So I fully expect some of
the initial images we see are going to be jaw dropping. And so overall, we estimate that we're going to detect
several thousand galaxies in the very early Universe, but how many we actually detect tells us something very important
about the physics. So even if we detect less than we expect, that's still really interesting from a scientific point of view. If you had spoken to people
that were expecting observations from the first Hubble data,
when Hubble first launched and told them about all
the amazing discoveries Hubble has made since then, it would probably blow their mind, right? They never would've
imagined we'd see galaxies as far away as we do or that we'd observe, planets around their stars, et cetera. So we fully expect James
Webb Space Telescope will find things we never
even knew to ask about. Unlike JWST, we can't see infrared
light with the human eye, but we can detect it through heat or experience it visually
using an infrared camera. Infrared light, you can think
of it like heat radiation. So everything glows in infrared, you and I are glowing and infrared. A lot of things in space give off infrared light too, like stars, nebulae, and galaxies. But to detect the faint, far away targets scientists are after, JWST has to be away from
the Earth's warm atmosphere. The problem is with Hubble is that Hubble is actually quite warm. Hubble is in low earth orbit, and it's about the same
temperature as the earth. And that means it's actually
emitting in the infrared. And that's a bad thing if you want to detect faint infrared light from very far away, because you are swamped
by the light coming from the telescope itself. So the James Webb Space
telescope has to be cold, really cold, minus 233
degrees Celsius cold. So the way we achieve that is firstly, by making the telescope open, it doesn't have a tube around it. But what it does have is a huge sunshield, and the telescope sits
behind that sunshield. We're also located at a place called L2, 1.5 million kilometers away from the earth where the sun and the earth
are always on the same side of the telescope. In this location, the telescope's main instruments can cool to near absolute zero temperatures and receive the infrared light. Then, they can take that
light and produce images, or analyze the light to learn
what materials are present. This is known as spectroscopy and is a major feature of
JWST's science instruments. We have four instruments on the telescope. And these different
instruments are optimized to do different things. So obviously, the imagers take images of the Universe in both the near-infrared and the mid-infrared part of the spectrum. The spectrographs take spectra of different objects in the Universe. So spectra are like you can
think of as like fingerprints of the objects. So spectra help tell us about
the chemical components, and what atoms and molecules are in the various different
things that we're looking at. Using two of these instruments, NIRCam and NIRspec, and
the power of the telescope, one team is going to
be able to take images and reveal the composition
of individual stars in our nearest large galaxy,
the Andromeda Galaxy. So we'll be looking 2.5
million years into the past. That means that the light
that we're seeing was emitted by the galaxy 2.5 million years ago. Andromeda is the nearest
large galaxy to the Milky way. It's our twin, if you like. They're both disc galaxies
and it's actually moving towards the Milky Way as well. They're gravitationally pulling each other towards one another and
eventually will actually collide. We see the Milky Way from inside, and that means we can just
see the individual stars in the sky. When we look at galaxies
outside the Milky Way, we just see them as a whole and you can't really pick
out individual stars. The great thing about Andromeda
is we're still looking at it from the outside in, but we can actually pick
out individual stars in the disc of Andromeda. Which makes it a fantastic
tool for doing this comparison where you want to extend the science that we're doing in the Milky Way to this whole galactic population. Because we study the Milky
Way in so much detail, it's like the Rosetta
Stone of galaxy formation, that we can use to inform our
understanding of galaxies. But of course then if the
Milky Way is an outlier and galaxies, like Andromeda
look much more run of the mill. Then that means a lot of the things that we know about the
Milky Way are not so useful. Other telescopes, while
there's plenty of telescopes that are good. They're just not quite good
enough to do this task. So we're gonna take spectra of 300 stars in the disc of Andromeda. And so what that means is
by measuring the regions of those spectra, where we see less light, we can actually understand
the element abundances, like oxygen, magnesium and silicon. Before we take those spectra,
we're gonna use the NIRCam, which is the near-infrared camera. And we're gonna essentially
use that to take images of Andromeda before we
go and take these spectra to make sure that we can
really target the regions of the galaxy that we need to. What I'm interested in
doing is going and checking whether this characteristic
element abundance distribution that we see in the Milky
Way is present in Andromeda, which is something that
we've not been able to do without JWST. We know that all the galaxies
we see in the Universe have been forming
throughout the whole history of our universe. So galaxies that we
see are a fossil record of the whole of galaxy formation. If you could link all of the dots together and you understood galaxy
formation very well, you could actually turn back
the clock on all the physics that happened in those galaxies and get to something like
the initial conditions of our universe where all
of everything came from. And I think those things
are just interesting and a project like this is telling us about the origins of our own galaxy. Most of us want to know
where we came from. Building a telescope that has enough power and sophistication to enable
these sorts of projects wasn't straightforward. Engineers had to come up
with a completely new design in comparison to Hubble. So this telescope has this giant mirror, about 6.5 meters across, about 22 feet. And it has a sunshield that's
the size of a tennis court. And so it's an odd looking
design, an odd looking telescope. The reason it was designed this
way is because it's so big. It stands about four stories tall so it's too big for any rocket to fit inside all unfolded in a rocket. So we had to fold it up
to fit inside the rocket and it unfolded once it was in space. Since space bound rockets do fail from time to time, over three
decades of work, $10 billion, and thousands of scientists'
work were on the line. And we have engine start. And liftoff. Decollage, liftoff, from
a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself, James Webb begins a
voyage back to the birth of the Universe. Honestly, the launch was
definitely not the hardest part of this mission. So following launch, we had
two weeks of really intense, complex, complicated deployments to get this telescope unfolded. And myself and I think
all of us on the team were really on the edge of our seats to wait for these deployments to happen. Given its distance to the Earth, if something went wrong
with JWST's deployments, there wouldn't be repair missions like there was with Hubble. The deployment of the sunshield
was particularly intense. The sunshield itself is five
layers and it had to unfold and then deploy the five layers. And there were hundreds
of release mechanisms on the sunshield that all had to release
at just the right time in just the right way. There were quite a few
single point failures so that if one release
mechanism didn't work, there would be nothing
we could do to fix it. And so this particular
part of the deployments, watching the sunshield deploy
was incredibly stressful. But everything went off so well. The engineers have built an
amazing, incredible telescope. And after that two weeks, I think all of us took a deep breath. There was definitely a big celebration after the last part of
the deployments happened. The launch was so incredibly efficient, using less fuel than anticipated, it extended the mission from five years, to an estimated 10 to 15 years. Months later, after the
instruments had cooled, there were a series of calibrations to make sure everything was aligned. The primary mirror is made
up of 18 different segments. And those segments had
to be perfectly aligned once the telescope was in space. So what we did was point the
telescope at a bright star, and then you essentially get back an image of 18 different stars. And so from using that image
and tracing the star image to the different segments, we
were able to individually move and tweak each segment
to get the telescope to align on the star. Each mirror had to be aligned to within the billionth of a meter, to form a single, primary mirror. That required making ultra
fine adjustments equal to 1/10,000th the width of a human hair, which took roughly three
months to complete. So once that was done, we
got back this beautiful image of what's otherwise a
boring star that showed, that proved that the
telescope was aligned. For me, one of the most exciting things about this boring star image is the fact that in this relatively short exposure, you could see galaxies in the background. And so it gave us a little hint of what's to come with this telescope. The star calibration image gave us the first glimpse of JWST's power. It will give scientists
the ability to peer into star-forming regions and to witness their birth
more clearly than ever before. We'll be looking back in time between 20,000 and 200,000 years. We will be looking at three
massive star forming regions. One is in the Milky Way, our galaxy and two are in nearby galaxies,
the Magellanic Clouds. NGC 3603 is a massive star
forming region located at about 20,000 light-years
away from us in the Milky Way. And it is made up of many
stars, many massive stars, some of which are even a hundred times more massive than the Sun, but there are many, many smaller
stars, stars like the Sun. The Tarantula Nebula is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud at a distance of about
150,000 light-years. The Tarantula is a massive
nursery of star formation. There are millions of stars
there that were just born, and some of them are still
being created, being formed. And the third region that we
want to study is called NGC346, is farther away still
about 200,000 light-years in the Small Magellanic
Cloud, yet another galaxy. In each one of these regions, we will select about 100 stars and we will look at them very carefully by blocking everything else. We want to get only the light of those that we are interested. So we can disperse the light
and produce a spectrum, very clear. But then with the camera, we
will look at the entire regions and they will be easily millions of stars that we'll be seeing in these parts. We will be looking at the massive stars, but we are particularly
interested in stars like the Sun, because those are the most likely ones to have planets around them. The main goal is to understand
what is the difference in the way in which stars
form in our own galaxy, and also nearby galaxies. But unfortunately, visible
light doesn't travel well in regions where you
have lots of dust and gas and the regions where stars
are forming are full of dust. So in those regions, it's very
difficult for visible light to go through but infrared
light has longer wavelength. So the light rays are able
to go around those particles and we can see light even
when there is lots of dust. So we can see through the dust. Stars are the building block of galaxies. They produce most of the power,
the light in the Universe, and they also make up the
elements, elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron. Most of the elements in our
body were actually made up in a star. And in fact, there is more, some of the heavy elements in our body like gold, copper, zinc actually formed when a massive star exploded as supernova. So even though studying how
stars form will not tell us who we are as human beings, it will definitely make us understand, make us realize that without stars, we would've never been
there in the first place. But it's not all about stars and galaxies. JWST was also built with a relatively new, exciting field in mind, exoplanets. Planets that are outside
of our own solar system. Although there weren't
any confirmed exoplanets while Hubble was being designed and built, it has contributed significantly
to this emerging field, giving us this first
visible-light image of one. Now there are over 5,000
confirmed exoplanets and in the last few decades, we've learned that the overwhelming majority
of stars have planets. JWST has capability to
study exoplanet atmospheres to a degree and precision that
has never been done before. And so the infrared part of the spectrum offers a really great insight into some of the really
interesting chemicals that might be in a planet's atmosphere, things like water vapor and
carbon dioxide and methane, things that could
possibly signal a surface that is habitable. And there's one particular system that's on everyone's mind. It's called Trappist-1,
and it has multiple planets in the habitable zone, the
orbital region around a star in which an Earth-like
planet can have liquid water on its surface and possibly support life. We will be looking about
40 years back in time, which is literally in our backyard. The Trappist-1 system is
what we can call the rockstar of exoplanets. This is a star is very small,
not much bigger than Jupiter, and that star has not one, but seven planet transiting its star. And we know that these
planets are of mass and sizes about similar to the
Earth and three of them and maybe four are right
in the habitable zone. And this system is very
close to the Earth, 40 light-years away. And this is the one that we'll
be looking very hard to find whether these planets have an atmosphere. And if there's a system to
point where there's maybe life that's the one, the Trappist-1 system. The Hubble space telescopes
tried to detect the atmospheres and so far has failed. And we need a very powerful telescope like James Webb to do this. To detect their atmosphere, finding whether they have oxygen, water, all the molecules that
are required for life as we know on earth. There are several methods, but the one that will be used very much by James Webb is the transit method. This is by chance you have a planet that goes in front of its
star from our perspective. And you can see a little light dipping, as the planet goes in front of the star. And that allows us to measure
the radius of the planet. But also we can actually
probe the atmosphere. So the light that is
filtered by the stars, by measuring the colors of
the atmospheres gives us a lot of information about the atmosphere. It's called transit spectroscopy. And that's a technique
that's been used with Hubble, but with some limited performance and the James Webb Space Telescope will be very well optimized to do these kinds of very
delicate observations. The Trappist-1 system is
by far the best system. This is the one that will
give us the strongest signal. And there will be lots of
time devoted to that system with all science instruments onboard JWST. It is to do with the fact
that the star is very close. So there's lots of light we
can get from the telescope. And also the relative size of the planet to the star is relatively large, and that makes things much easier. We love small star and big
planet and for Earth-like planet. Well, the Trappist-1 system
is just a perfect system. I think just knowing that these
planets have an atmosphere and knowing that we have a
planet in the habitable zone and there's water on it, that
would be a big, big deal. That would be a first step
to say, look, this is here. We need to look in that system. Dr. Doyon was among the scientists who worked on the telescope
as principal investigator of the instrument provided
by the Canadian Space Agency. The telescope was such
a massive undertaking with numerous science goals
and technical challenges, that it required the
collaboration of NASA, the Canadian Space Agency,
and the European Space Agency. So with the James Webb Space Telescope, which astronomers started
thinking about as early as the end of the '80s, even
before Hubble was launched, European astronomers were involved along with our American colleagues
and with the Canadians, from the beginning, from the outset, and built a bigger and better telescope that wouldn't be possible
with just one agency alone. Scientists who worked on the telescope were allotted time but
anyone could submit proposals from anywhere in the world. This whole process is dual anonymous. So don't know who's proposing
and who's doing the grading. And that's the way that the
telescope time is allocated. One of the great things about these NASA astrophysics missions is that anyone in the world
with a good idea can apply to use time on the telescope. And that happens, we get
proposals from around the world, to use the telescope and
at the end of the day, the best proposals are chosen. Anonymous proposals
meant that bias was kept to a minimum, and ensured that
JWST covered a broad range of science goals, even ones focusing on our own solar system. We are looking at the farthest regions of our solar system. So this is 4.6 hours that
the light takes to come to the Earth. The acronym trans-Neptunian
objects is TNOs. These are objects that are orbiting beyond the orbit of Neptune so in the coldest regions
of our solar system. There are estimated to be billions of trans-Neptunian objects,
even if at this moment, we have only discovered
around 3000 of them. TNOs are one of the most pristine bodies in our solar system. That means that they have
been not too much processed since they formed. So they hold clues and
they hold information from the very first
stages of the formation of the solar system. This basically means that they
are like frozen time capsules that are there waiting for
us to unveil those secrets. The largest objects in the
trans-Neptunian Belt together with Pluto is Haumea, Eris and Makemake, and because they are so
large, they have activity, they may have an atmosphere,
they have a lot of ice like methane, nitrogen, CO. Those are in the largest TNOs and we think they were an ingredient for the formation of all the TNOs. But when it comes to really
know what is on the surface of these objects, we don't really know. So we want to look if in the smaller TNOs, there are also some kind,
some amounts of these ice. We want to know which are the ingredients that are on the surface,
and which is the state, the physical and chemical
state of these ingredients, the recipe to cook a small body. We have 60 TNOs in our sample, we have representation of all the colors. What we are doing is, we take the light that comes from one of these
bodies and then it's channeled through this instrument is called NIRSpec, and this is a near infrared spectrograph. NIRSpec is going to serve
in a part of the light that can't be reached
for TNOs from the earth. So we are just separating the
light to get to know really, each single material that can be there. So James Webb comes on time and is perfect to do this science because it's out of the atmosphere. We have a preconceived idea of what is a TNO based on
the knowledge that we have. But our knowledge is limited
and the best things about tools like JWST is that they are
really discovery tools. They are going to provide
us with many answers to questions that we
didn't even know we had. Apart from JWST, many ground-based telescopes
will be coming online in the next few years, complimenting the science JWST will do. Like the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, estimated to come online in 2023. It is a wide survey telescope expecting to discover thousands of
new objects like TNOs, so then telescopes like
JWST can look at them in more detail. And the next big space telescope
is just around the corner. The big telescopes like Hubble
and JWST only come along, once every couple of decades. And the next big telescope
like this, that we're building is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. So that particular telescope
is not quite as big or expensive as JWST, but it
is also an infrared telescope that's designed to see the Universe in more of a broad swath. So telescopes like Hubble
and JWST are designed to see small parts of
the Universe very deeply, but by looking a little
less deep, but more wide, we can learn different
things about the Universe. People often ask, are
these telescopes worth it? We're spending a lot of
money on these telescopes. JWST is $10 billion. Hubble from its late
inception in the late '70s all the way to now is about $16 billion and so the question of is it
worth it is an important one. These are funded by taxpayers and of course all of that money that's quote, unquote sent
into space is spent right here on Earth, of course,
funding high tech jobs. But in addition to that, I think if we look at the
past 30 years of Hubble and what we foresee as a
bright future with JWST, if you put that in the context
of money spent per year, it turns out to be less
than a cup of coffee, a cheap cup of coffee,
per citizen, per year. Human beings are curious. We all want to know from where we come. Yes, we exist because stars exist. And so it's good for us to
understand what are the elements and processes that are
actually needed for us as human beings to exist. I know for myself, thinking
over the past year, the past couple of years with
so much going on in the world and so much negativity
having the positivity of a mission like this to look forward to and something that's
working and successful and is a symbol of people
all over the world, working together to achieve something that is technologically amazing. For me that's awe-inspiring and gives me hope for
the future of humanity. It's so easy to get wrapped up in things that are happening on planet Earth and not go and think about
these beautiful things that we see. But then on the other hand,
things like understanding how stars work can teach
us about nuclear fusion, for example, the way that
the elements are produced in the Universe. I think it's just a fundamental question that human beings should want to know. Historically, whenever a new
facility is put together, and you ask the question
five, 10 years later, what was the main discovery
that this telescope made? Nobody could predict it. I can talk to you about all
the kind of stuff we think we're gonna be doing, but you know what, we don't know, and that's the
most exciting part of this. Who has not wondered
about looking at the sky? Who does not wonder about
knowing that we are not alone? All of that knowledge that wonders us, it comes because someone asked himself, what is that that is out there?
