The James Webb Space Telescope's remarkable gifts

Once Upon a Time three wise men looked to the  heavens and saw a guiding star Millennia have   passed but as David Pogue will show us we're still  looking Skyward aided by a wondrous tool the story   of Christmas features a miraculous astronomical  site yes it was the Star of Bethlehem which   Shone so brightly but this we're blessed with an  abundance of New Visions from the skies Jupiter   and its rings 385 Million Miles Away the Carina  nebula 7500 light years away the Phantom Galaxy   32 million light years away and the deepest  regions of space 13 billion light years away   these pictures come from the James webb Space  Telescope which lifted off on Christmas Day 2   years ago lift off James webb begins a voyage  back to the birth of the universe in 1989 NASA   began thinking about a successor to the Hubble  telescope the new machine would have massive   goldplated lenses that could detect infrared  light invisible to our eyes but capable of   passing through dust and gases from 100 times  farther into the universe the web would also   be much bigger than the Hubble three stories tall  and 70 feet wide too big to fit into any existing   rocket NASA's solution Fold It Up how complex is  this unfolding process they have things that are   called single point failures right this has to  move this way and there's only one of them web   has over 300 of those the light goes from here to  here to here Scott Willoughby oversaw the web's   construction at northrop Grumman we first met 10  days before the launch 300 things that have to go   exactly right correct yeah so now on the second  anniversary of the launch we can finally ask so   how' it go it literally went perfect as close to  perfect as one could have even imagined it just   seems improbable given that moving parts are  always hell yeah people actually asked after   did you overblow how hard this was right and the  truth was practicing for everything as if it could   go wrong was the best preparation for making  it go right it took almost 7 months for the   telescope to unfold calibrate and reach its orbit  a million miles from Earth and because infrared   is a form of heat it also had to get cold -400°  even the sun's heat would blind the telescope to   the faint infrared signals from space so we have  to block out any shred of that Sun by deploying   a big sun shield a big umbrella effectively  there's only one star in the entire universe   will never see and it's ours it's the Sun finally  the science could begin this is the flight control   room this is where we talk to the telescope we're  telling it hi there anything unexpected happened   send us all the sweet sweet data that you've been  collecting over the last several hours Jane Rigby   is the web's Chief scientist she works at NASA's  Space Telescope science institute in Baltimore   the elevator pitch for the web telescope was to  get the baby pictures of the universe right we   have delivered exactly what we promised on that  topic we've gone from basically ignorance about   what that first billion years of the universe  was like to having it in crisp high definition   another web mission to examine distant planets to  see see if any of them have atmospheres like ours   maybe to find one we could live on but how can  a telescope know what's in a distant planet's   atmosphere turns out when a planet passes in front  of its star the elements of its atmosphere oxygen   nitrogen whatever block specific bands of light  and by analyzing how the rainbow changes when the   planet is in front of the star we can tell you  what the atmosphere of that planet is like the   has already studied the atmospheres of dozens  of distant planets it found carbon dioxide and   methane on this one which suggests that it has  oceans it's such a joy that this telescope is   working so well because it was built really well  by the engineers but not all the web headlines   have been triumphant the one in June 2022 didn't  sound good at all web's been hit by a meteorite   made a hole yes what was that day like yeah it  was wonderful you know so we designed the mirrors   to to get hit by micro meteorites you know small  particles say grain of sand or or something like   that but I me you're truly talking about one small  spot in something 22 feet across right the impact   of it was really irrelevant it actually didn't  impact science at all but there were also some   questions about the photos was NASA manipulating  them colorizing them that question actually comes   up a lot is what web sees real NASA image experts  Joe DePasquale and Alyssa Pagan can answer the   questions about colorizing they're the ones who  do it it's our job to be able to translate that   light into something that our eyes can see as  it turns out there's a lot of light that people   can't see like ultraviolet light which bees can  see or infrared light which pit vipers can see   ultraviolet light travels in very short waves  infrared w waves are much longer and that's   what guides the colorizing process we're taking  the shortest wavelengths applying the Bluer color   the middle wavelength that's the green and then  the longest wavelength gets assigned the red this   is what we think is the truest representation  of what we could possibly see if we could see   an infrared light if you that Viper that can  see infrared right in just the first year of   web observations scientists published over 600  papers based on its discoveries and according   to Scott Willoughby the telescope has one  more little gift for us this Christmas when   we launched we never had a correct our own rocket  engines we saved all of that fuel and effectively   on day one doubled the launch of the mission  from 10 years to 20 wait a minute so you you   told you told Congress that this thing would run  for 10 years that's right and now you're saying we   get another 10 for free we used zero contingency  Fuel and that leads to 10 more years of operation   so for at least 20 years scientists around the  world will keep peeling back the mysteries of   the universe and the web will keep sending back  pictures that amaze and amuse us from the optical   Quirk known as the question mark to the Galaxy  cluster that NASA calls the Christmas tree and Beyond

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

Views: 158,307

Keywords: Sunday Morning, Science

Id: LRsGp3-YDRM

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023