Things We’ve Never Seen: The James Webb Space Telescope Explores the Cosmos

[Music] our minds urge to soar to the cosmos but evolution by natural selection is driven by different goals natural selection it cares about survival and propagation of our genetic material our eyes in particular they evolve for the various earthbound challenges faced by our forebears and surely not to do things like examine the rings of saturn the andromeda galaxy or the black hole sagittarius a star there's just not much survival value in any of those undertakings and so as our minds have developed and as our drive to explore the wider landscape of reality has become ever stronger we've realized that we need to leverage technology to enhance and augment and extend the bare senses that evolution has provided now an essential move in this direction was not motivated by astronomy the history is a bit murky but sometime in the early 1600s in the netherlands an eyeglass maker named hans lippershay realized that by looking through an appropriate combination of glass lenses he could in his own description see things far away as if they were nearby explaining well the name the device would ultimately bear the telescope from the ancient greek tele meaning far and scopos meaning to see the description also explains why an immediate interest in the telescope came from you guessed it the military now as word of this delightful invention spread rapidly others tried their hand at fashioning telescopes and it was around 1609 that galileo galilei built his own version and was among the first to use it as a tool for a series of astronomical observations allowing him and others to reveal remarkable qualities of the heavens which to that point were completely hidden the moons of jupiter the phases of venus the rocky pockmarked surface of the moon and the fact that the sun marked by sunspots is rotating in short order various innovators among them the great isaac newton realized that curved mirrors could bend and focus the trajectories of light rays much as curved glass curved lenses do and yet can be much easier to grind and use because they're much lighter i mean after all the entire thickness of a lens is responsible for focusing light while for a mirror only its thin surface matters and so in the decades and centuries it followed scientists leveraged this and many other innovations to build telescopes that could gather ever more light allowing us to peer ever farther and with ever greater resolution into the depths of space and with each advance our knowledge of the cosmos increased and refined from the discovery of star forming nebulae neutron stars black holes distant galaxies the expansion of space and the microwave background radiation the more powerful our tools for observing the universe the more surprises we've found now both theorists like myself and astronomers undertaking the observations we we live for those days when observations reveal something startling something that does not fit in something that forces us to rethink our theories and one of the most striking examples of recent memory one that frankly we are still trying to sort out came from observations in the 1990s showing that the expansion of space is speeding up it's accelerating suggesting the possibility of a still deeply mysterious diffuse anti-gravity presence of fusing space which we call dark energy but notwithstanding that we've named it we still don't know exactly what it is the hubble space telescope played a big part in that monumental discovery and many others too and floating a few hundred miles above the distorting effects of the earth's atmosphere the hubble space telescope's observations have indeed been a game changer propelling our understanding of the cosmos to a whole new level now the successor to the hubble space telescope called the james webb space telescope decades in the making is poised for launch on a longer journey this new space telescope will float about a million miles away from earth at a special location tailor-made by the laws of physics to keep the telescope continually in line with the earth and the sun now we'll talk about why that is shortly but when you consider the massive size and extraordinary precision of this telescope and you can get a feel for it from this full-scale model that we hosted at the world science festival back in 2010 that million-mile journey will be nerve-racking to say the least but with extraordinary testing and numerous fail-safes the project scientists and engineers are confident that all will go smoothly or at least smoothly enough it is incredibly exciting and not just to scientists artists from around the country have been inspired by the grandeur of this instrument and by its potential to give insight into questions ranging from how did the universe begin when did the first stars form are there signs of life on other planets i'd say it's possible perhaps even likely that this new space telescope will be looked back upon by future generations as a turning point in humanity's understanding of the universe tonight we are honored to be joined by some of the leaders behind the james webb space telescope as well as those who will be among its first users and they're here to discuss the potential of this remarkable new way of exploring the cosmos [Music] our first guest is adam reese who is the bloomberg distinguished professor at johns hopkins university and a distinguished astronomer at the space telescope science institute in baltimore maryland re-study supernovae and his observations of these exploding stars established the paradigm shaking result that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate for which he shared the 2011 nobel prize he joins us from his office in baltimore welcome adam our next guest is john mather who is a senior astrophysicist in the observational cosmology laboratory at nasa's goddard space flight center and is the senior project scientist on the james webb space telescope in 2006 he shared the nobel prize for work using nasa's kobe satellite to measure the heat radiation from the big bang that result helps solidify the big bang as the prevalent theory for the origin of the universe he joins us from his home outside of washington d.c welcome john next we have avena vondishook who is a professor of molecular astrophysics at loddon observatory in the netherlands and is the 2018 complete prize laureate in astrophysics she is netherlands lead scientist for the james webb space telescope the former president of the international astronomical union and is a renowned pioneer in the field of astro chemistry she joins us from germany where she is doing research at the max planck institute welcome avina okay finally we have natalie battaglia who holds the presidential chair at the university of california santa cruz where she is the director of astrobiology prior to that she was a research astronomer at nasa where she was the lead scientist on the kepler mission a space telescope designed to find planets orbiting other stars she joins us from portland oregon welcome natalie and welcome to you all all right guys it's uh exciting time the james webb space telescope you know 25 years in the making is uh soon to blast off on its mission to roughly a million or so miles from the earth to start its scientific work so i thought it would be good to start with a focus on the instrument itself and then we'll turn to some of the fundamental science that many of you plan to do using the james webb space telescope now most people are more familiar with the hubble space telescope so john if you could just get us going here i know it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison but how powerful is say the james webb compared to hubble i mean we know about the beautiful hubble images that have given us insight into black holes in the centers of galaxies giving us insight into the expansion of the universe how much more powerful above that device is the james webb well in round numbers we say it's 100 times more powerful but that's because we can't really compare apples and oranges so the web telescope can do things that the hubble can't do at all so the hubble observes that ultraviolet wavelengths visible wavelengths and just a little bit of the infrared and the web telescope starts with red wavelengths and goes all the way out to 28 microns which is much longer and and shows us new things so we've never been able to see that well at those longer wavelengths we do have or i did have telescopes in space that could pick up these longer wavelengths but they're done the spitzer space telescope is too far away now for us to talk to it so this is it this is the great next step for astronomy adam from the standpoint of someone whose work is in cosmology why is the infrared a natural place and a sweet spot from the theoretical standpoint to do observations right well so the james webb has this you know really this super power of being able to observe uh very far to the red because it is so cold and there's more or less i would say two basic things we like to look at in the universe one is uh distant objects uh which are greatly redshifted by the expansion of space and so if you want to look very far back in time you actually have to look red and so the sensitivity of jwst in the red is fantastic and then unfortunately there is a lot of dust or grit in the universe and it obscures some of the objects that we use as lamp posts to measure and gauge the universe and so that red capability also allows us to see through the dust and so we will get a clearer view and a more distant view by being able to observe further to the red evina what's the timeline between launch and starting to actually take data that's actually quite a long timeline um because first uh after launch uh the the telescope needs to start unfolding um the sunshield needs to sun shield needs to to to spread out and unfold that's that's going to be a critical step i think that happens all in the first week it of course needs to cruise to what we call the lagrangian point where it's uh it's going to be for the whole period of its observations but then it needs to cool it takes time to to simply cool down the telescope um and so all together it's going to be a month before the instruments start to be turned on and and before we start getting the first data uh in fact the whole commissioning period takes about six months six months and is there a point in that sequence of events where everyone finally breathes a sigh of relief is there sort of one major hurdle that once you clear that we're good to go or is it just every step of the way something could go wrong well i think that first you know two weeks are clearly going to be crucial with all the the unfolding of the sun shield the telescope the secondary that that comes out that's going to be crucial but then also turning on all of these instruments one by one and then checking out that they're still working i think that's everybody's going to be um you know quite tense on the other side yeah so natalie um both john and avina mentioned that this the web telescope is going to this lagrange point the l2 point as we call it if you take a course in orbital mechanics why why that location and and and how far is that from earth the lagrange point is beyond the orbit of the moon so it's far away and that's great for astronomy because you don't have thermal and light effects coming from the earth in the sun with the kepler mission for example we had instrument stability the instrument stability was affected by the detailed position of the spacecraft in relation to the earth and the sun so you want to be far away from those effects in order to have very high stability of your instruments and and i gather that the lagrange point is chosen because it'll keep an alignment between the telescope earth and the sun so that relative to each other they'll stay in a nice stable configuration so the conditions the heat from the sun heat from the earth will be conditions that will be stable over time and this hopefully the heat shield will shield all the delicate equipment and it'll be able to take take its data going forward now of course hubble is still going strong at some you know 30 odd years later but we're hearing that the web has a more finite lifetime what's the difference between the two well okay on the hubble there's nothing that's being used up as they go it doesn't need fuel to keep pointing itself or doing anything so it just needs to keep on going around the earth and finally it'll gravity will pull it in because of the drag of air so that's what sets the ultimate life of the hubble for the web we need a little bit of fuel to help point to the telescope and to keep it in the right orbit so when we run out of that that's our ultimate limit aside from that it's chances that we take with all those electronic parts that will or will not last of ever so that's what sets the limit for the web uh we're actually carrying fuel for at least 10 years of flight operations and if we are lucky it might last 20 or more it's interesting that you say that because that was that's actually going to be my follow-on question i was going to say that if i was a project scientist i would have said we cannot go beyond five years and then when it went 10 15 or 20 it would have been a miracle but now you're on the record that it might go 10 or 20. which uh i i love the optimism so so that's fantastic thank you yeah well i am optimistic but this is the first time for this kind of equipment and so is the uncertainty in the life literally the uncertainty in the amount of fuel that it will require to redirect and so forth or uh is it sort of a best case scenario that if everything goes according to plan and we don't have to keep reorienting then the fuel might last that much longer yeah well the biggest uncertainty is how well is the ariane 5 rocket do because we need a little bit of fuel just to correct in case it doesn't do the exact orbit that it's supposed to do so we have to reserve some for that if we're lucky and it does a really good job then we have much longer life for the observatory itself with hubble when it went up there was an issue at first right the the mirror wasn't ground to i guess the exact specifications necessary and a kind of contact lens needed to be uh inserted later on when you're talking about a telescope that's beyond the moon maybe like four times the distance to the moon we're presumably we're not going to be able to have any missions to fix it if something goes wrong or or can we or is that just out of the question that's what makes me most nervous the most nervous about this mission is the fact that it's not serviceable like hubble so we talk about the launch and we're all very nervous about the launch period and turning on each of these instruments and making sure everything goes well during the commissioning period but i will actually be nervous throughout the lifetime of this mission over the five or ten years that it flies because things age instruments can have glitches we've seen that in the past with other space telescopes and we want the instruments to be healthy for the duration for as long as we have fuel on the spacecraft to operate so it's it's an issue throughout the lifetime of web because it's not serviceable maybe one day it will be i do hope that one day we can send either robots or humans out to the lagrange point in order to service our telescopes because that is such a valuable place to put our astronomical instruments but for now that's not possible and that's that's going to keep us awake at night i have anxiety dreams sometimes about what i'm going to cook for dinner the next night i mean i i don't know that i'd be able to sleep with that i mean how's your your state of anxiety over the upcoming launch we've seen all these vibration tests of the the instruments and i was always relieved when it came out still in one piece after these vibration tests but that's indeed going to be a very exciting period the launch so can you give us a sense of of of the the scale of this telescope i mean i've seen the hexagonal mirrors up close and personal but but give a sense how big are they how many of them are there and ultimately what will the unfolded size of the instrument be okay well the big mirror that we need to collect the starlight is actually about 21 feet across it's made out of 18 big golden hexagons and they're actually ultra light so that you would be able to lift a single golden hexagon because they're not solid gold they're made of very lightweight beryllium covered with gold because that's the best reflector for infrared and it is huge 21 feet across is bigger than the rocket so and it's got to be protected from the heat of the sun by an umbrella we call it a sunshade and it's five layers of metallized plastic that are as big as a tennis court so all of that has to be folded up origami style very carefully to go in the top of the rocket and so my understanding is in some of the early tests at least one of the early tests that sunshield actually ripped is that is that is that what happened and how did you respond to that and are you confident that we're good to go in in this round yeah so we actually have unfolded it several times and each time we look very carefully is there an even a little tiny scratch so we have found a few little tiny cuts where we said that should not be so we put little patches over those and we say what made that happen can we fix that so yes we've repaired everything that we can imagine that would never make it cut again so we think it's good to go so now let's also now turn to the work that you're going to be heading up which has to do with planets and and planetary atmospheres so it can give us a sense of of what the motivation is and how you're going to go about this particular project with the james webb when i mean as john said webb started construction in something like 1995 in 1995 that was the year that the very first planet orbiting another sun-like star was discovered so when webb was constructed we were only beginning to learn about other worlds orbiting other stars today we have over 4 000 over 4 500 known planets orbiting other stars and we have some many surprises that were revealed over these last two decades two and a half decades and you know when i when i look back on this discovery i kind of imagine different epochs different stages in our development the first 10 years was kind of like postage stamp collecting you know every one discovery of a new world was really celebrated and and poured over but then in 2009 nasa's kepler mission launched and we were no longer discovering one planet at a time now we were discovering hundreds even thousands at a time and that enabled another epoch of studying exoplanet demographics exoplanets as populations and what we learned from kepler is that the diversity of planets in our galaxy far exceeds the diversity of planets in our own solar system and and now 25 years later after that first discovery we are literally knocking on the door of a new epoch of exploration which is the study of exoplanet atmospheres and it's going to give us a new lens on their diversity when you think about earth's atmosphere it's this thin little layer that is hovering right above the earth's crust if you try to imagine measuring properties of an atmosphere at the distances that we're talking about it seems mind-bogglingly difficult how do you go about gaining insight into something that's so thin at such an enormous distance yeah you you asked john earlier what is the power of web you know over hubble besides the fact that we have 10 times the collecting area so we get more photons that allows us to increase the precision of our measurements so we can see very tiny features of these you know from these very small exoplanets but also web is a spectroscopic machine we're going to be looking in color space hubble produced these very famous images that we all know and love and web will produce amazing images of the cosmos as well but what we're also going to be doing with web is collecting light from astrophysical objects like exoplanets spreading that light out into a rainbow and looking at that rainbow with very uh close scrutiny and that will allow us to see the chemical fingerprints that an atmosphere leaves on the light for exoplanets with web what we're going to do well we're going to observe them in many different ways but one of the primary ways is to observe the star when the planet is transiting across the surface and when that happens this very thin layer of the atmosphere will intercept some of the photons from the star on its way to our telescope and then we will spread that light out to into into a rainbow and disentangle these chemical fingerprints from the atmosphere from the chemical fingerprints of the host star for example so do you have any sense right now of what fraction of exoplanets have a significant atmosphere that's a great question and i would have to say for the earth-like planets we don't yet know you know we've done this game a little bit with hubble we have observed about a couple dozen of what we call hot jupiters maybe down to a hot neptune sized planet we've looked at them atmospherically at their atmospheric signatures with hubble and with a very rare narrow slice of this color space that captures water features for example from the water molecule giant planets like jupiter have very thick hydrogen rich envelopes in terms of an atmosphere a large percentage of the mass of jupiter for example is due to this envelope or what planetary scientists would call an atmosphere when you go down to the terrestrial size planets especially when they're orbiting very close to their host star we think that those atmospheres get stripped away relatively easily and so we want to know what fraction have atmospheres because that's going to have significant implications for whether or not they are potential abodes of life and so that is exactly one of the things that we want to learn is what fraction of terrestrial size planets actually have atmospheres when you look at an atmosphere of say a terrestrial size planet presumably finding something that has a composition not unlike earth that presumably that's that's the home run but are there other markers within an atmosphere that you will be looking for and if you see them you can say there is some case to be made that a living system may be responsible for those markers well webb was not designed to be a life finder and we have a lot to learn before we start looking in earnest for biosignatures these signatures of life imparted by life that has actually taken a global toehold of a planet and influence the atmosphere in a global way that's remotely detectable you know i mentioned that kepler uncovered this diversity of planets one of the things right out the gate that kepler discovered is that the most common type of planet in the galaxy orbiting in the inner solar systems is a type of planet we don't even have in our solar system you know in our solar system we've got the tiny rocky things orbiting nearby we've got the big giants orbiting far away um but in the galaxy it turns out that the most common type of planet is something in between and we don't know what its nature is it's been suggested that a large fraction of these planets started out as something like neptune but in the dynamical formation and evolution processes of of planetary systems those planets could have migrated inwards towards their host star so what happens if you take a neptune and you plunk it down in an orbit like earth's what's going to happen to it well scientists say that what happens to it is the hydrogen envelope gets completely stripped away leaving a rocky core so rocky cores are great for life right is that a potential abode of life does that broaden the number of landscapes available for for life in the galaxy we don't know so we want to understand that mysterious population that we don't have in our own solar system and in doing so by looking at the atmospheres we will have diagnostics that allow us to understand all of the physical processes that sculpt a planetary atmosphere and leave something after a billion or two billion years where life could or could not take a toll hold so that most common of all planets revealed by those surveys can you give us a sense of what those planets will i mean how big are they if they're bigger than us but not as big as say jupiter where do they fit in the range are terrestrial planets let's do it in terms of earth units let's call earth one so earth venus are about one earth radius mars is about half that mercury is about the size of our moon a little bit bigger the next largest thing in our solar system is neptune and uranus at four times the size of the earth jupiter ten times the size of the earth so in this range between one and four you know we don't really have anything in our solar system unless you want to keep looking out at the kuiper belt in the very distant regions of the solar system maybe there's something still lurking there that's yet to be discovered but as far as we know today there's nothing in this range of one to four and the most common type of planet that uh we know of is in the size range of like one and a half to two and a half earth radius earth radii am i right that is your daughter um a lead scientist on a mission to explore those kinds of planets is that correct yes she is she's the principal investigator of one of the largest programs that was selected for cycle one that will observe about a dozen planets in that size range in order to better understand their diversity and how they transform themselves from something more like neptune that has a hydrogen envelope which we call a primordial atmosphere by the way because it's it's formed we think during the planet formation process versus the atmosphere of earth in comparison with the atmosphere of earth which we believe was mostly outgassed we call it a secondary atmosphere because it was outgassed later in the earth in earth's evolution and so yes my daughter is a research astronomer at nasa ames research center and she is the pi of that mission and i'm actually a co-investigator on it as well well that's great so adam let's turn to um one of the main science projects that the web will be focused upon which is in the arena of early universe cosmology and it's interesting because what i'd like to discuss for a few minutes is something that was not on the scientific radar when the web was being built it's this issue called the hubble tension having to do with measurements in the last few years that have really begun to show potential discrepancy in our observations of cosmological qualities of the world and our theoretical understanding of cosmology has to do with expansion of space i'll let you explain it to us but i'll simply note that over the years the rate of expansion of space has been this vital quantity that we have been trying to nail down so can you give us a sense of where we stand on understanding the expansion rate of the universe the tension that we're now under and what webb might do to help resolve it sure so in the last 20 years we've developed a new model of cosmology and we think we understand the universe and can therefore make predictions and one of the key predictions is to observe the universe shortly after the big bang with the cosmic micro microwave background and essentially calibrate the state of the universe then how fast it was expanding what it was composed of and then use our understanding of the physics of the universe to really predict or extrapolate to the present time how fast should the universe be expanding now and then we measure the expansion rate a number called the hubble constant and the hubble space telescope was designed largely to measure the hubble constant to about 10 precision and that was successful and uh maybe we should have quit while we were ahead because we continued to measure better with the newer instruments in hubble and as we approached percent level precision which is about where we are now we've begun to see i guess sort of cracks uh in this sort of uh uh standard model our ability to go from end to end of the universe and explain the dynamics of the expanding universe is falling short there's a discrepancy now and it's becoming quite significant and so hubble has left us with this kind of cliffhanger if you will and we hope that the james webb space telescope can step in and sort of help us resolve or better understand uh what's going on so in terms of the actual numbers for those in the audience who like the details what is the best observational number that we have for the expansion rate and and what would we have anticipated based on the theory right right so before hubble launched it was somewhere between 50 and 100 the universe somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years old and then after these observations and careful measurements uh we're now down to a range of 67 to 73 which sounds like a lot of progress you know the glasses have full here we understand a great deal about the universe the problem is the cosmic microwave background data says it should be 67 plus or minus 0.5 and the local measurements uh generally coalesce around 73 plus or minus one and a half or so and so this has become uncomfortably far apart and suggests maybe there's another wrinkle in the standard model of the universe maybe uh these concepts or these realities like dark energy and dark matter are a little more complicated a little less vanilla have some other important physics that we're not including in our description of the universe so just quickly when you say say 67 or 73 can just give a sense of what those numbers are telling us about the expansion of space so they're in funny units that we call kilometers per second per megaparsec so they say every time you go out another megaparsec which is like three million light years the universe is expanding 67 to 73 kilometers per second faster but you could think of that number as a doubling rate so uh at that expansion rate it means you know the universal double about every 10 billion years at this point got it so john you know certainly over the course of my career in physics i you know i don't work on on observations and and uh the cosmological parameters are more of an input to me as opposed to something that i've spent any time ever trying to determine but i've i've witnessed a tension between different groups claiming different values for the expansion of space over a long period of time do you consider this tension to be different from what we have heard in the past or do you anticipate somehow it'll all just work out and the standard cosmological theory will still work at the end of the web observations good question so uh when i started in on this world of cosmology there really wasn't much of a number when uh adam says 50 or 100 let's like we don't know and so at that time the the disputes between those groups were extremely vigorous and people were quite sure they were right and now we know neither group was quite right so i'm an experimenter i like to measure things and i'm always afraid that it's my fault when i get an answer that somebody doesn't agree with so that's my guess of course that we're making some error in our measurement and nature has just fooled us about something but that makes us a little bit blind to the possibility that maybe nature has really got something to tell us that there's something that not in our story that we might just be happening on and we have to be really really careful so my expectation this time is is why wouldn't why wouldn't it be complicated nature is always complicated so i would not be surprised a bit if we are happening on something really remarkable and if i could just jump in here for one second um i will say what's really interesting about the current moment is in the past when as john said people disagreed about the value of this number they thought they were measuring the same thing they were measuring it locally they were using the same tools so we knew both things couldn't be right what's so fascinating about this is we're actually measuring this quantity starting at opposite ends of the universe and so in this case it's possible that both measurements are right and it's telling us something about the story we use to connect the two and so while i can't tell you yet what the answer is you know that makes it i think a much more interesting moment because uh it has the potential to give us a clue about the universe as opposed to just uh well who's right right now it would be asking too much for you to to as you say tell us what the ultimate answer will be but there are some potential stories on the table uh do any of them strike you as plausible at the moment or are they all just sort of cooked up to try to make things worse right you know i'm in a funny position to to tell you what's plausible because you know 20 years ago when we saw the universe was accelerating you know it was attributed to dark energy and a cosmodrome constant and as you know there's about 120 orders of magnitude gap between a sort of quantum level understanding of the cost module constant and what we actually see so is that plausible you know are we comfortable with that explanation so in that context some of the things that are suggested now are you know another episode of dark energy before the universe became transparent um dark matter decaying over time another relativistic particle like a neutrino believe it or not any of these things can explain why the universe is not tracking the simplest cosmological model and so as an observer i struggle with what's natural uh what's surprising you know the universe is so surprising to me that you know i i find i don't have a good prior for just evaluating what seems reasonable and it could also be that einstein's general theory of relativity which has done a pretty good job at describing a lot maybe there's some modification being hinted at and yet on the largest scales of the universe when we apply general relativity we get these interesting phenomena that we struggle with dark matter dark energy this extra uh expansion that is looks like the hubble tension so you know maybe on large scales we've finally broken general relativity it's it's you know it's hard to say so when do you start your observing run i mean do you have time that's already reserved on the telescope yeah a specific window yeah so the so the first year of the telescope hopefully it's working well we will uh and you know after it's calibrated we will dive into uh going back through hubble the telescope's footsteps and greatly improving both using the superpower of greater red sensitivity but also greater resolution so we look at stars in other galaxies to calibrate the expansion of the universe and like if you were looking at a cloud of fireflies you would want to be able to pick out the individual fireflies to determine you know how bright they are and how far away they are well hubble kind of tends to blur those fireflies together and so with jwst we will get such a crisp vision that we will separate the fireflies and do a better job of picking out the individual ones and we will be able to improve the precision of measurements and is there a date certain though is it like june 12th at 11 23 your run begins is it scheduled at that level scheduling the telescope is very complicated as you heard we want to uh reserve and conserve fuel and so a very tightly choreographed schedule is built that keeps the telescope from having to move around too much and so after it's settled after they know how much fuel they have after they know the configuration then they build that schedule and you know it'll mostly be just the the ability to most conserve the movements of the telescope and so when your run is happening is it is it like a 24 hour a day data collection enterprise it is unlike hubble also which used to get blocked or occulted by the earth every 45 minutes jwst will be able to observe pretty much all the time and you know we'll probably get some notice just a couple weeks before that our time is coming up and we'll have a block of time and then you know the data will be taken and beamed down and you know we'll be very excited to look at the first day is it almost real time i mean can you sit at your your your computer and and sort of see the data coming right if it's like hubble you know it'll tend to be probably an hour or two delay not too much and how long does it take to think after getting the data to do the analysis and announce something to the world you know it it depends a great deal on um the nature of the data and uh you know until we see it you know what complexities are there what you know how what configuration jwst ends up in when hubble launched as you said there were problems and so you had this this kind of strange aberration in the images and you had to use sophisticated software to try to remove it so in situations like that it can take years in other cases you could look at the first picture and go oh look there's nothing around the objects we were looking at they were clean as a whistle and uh we can tell you what this means so you know it's going to depend and and what's the size of your team that will be doing that data analysis is it you in a small group or is this a massive yeah yeah yeah that's one of the one of the elegant features i think of all of these space telescopes is you know they're massive endeavors that involve you know tens of thousands of people and yet the research teams for individual investigations can be quite small they can be you know half a dozen people uh that's uh in our case you know somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen people and so you know you have these sort of micro investigation teams spread throughout the ability to use these facilities very different than like a uh a particle accelerator yeah aveeno let's turn toward physics astronomy that's a little bit um closer to us both in space and time so your work is focused on trying to understand the formation of stars and planets and the web is meant to give you an image of the universe that that is actually so new no one's ever seen it before so just give us a sense of of what you imagine that to be and how the physics will allow you to see where no one has seen before yeah no it's uh it's all about sort of origins uh that encompasses the science that we will be doing so origins of stars but especially also origins of planets how are planets formed in these rotating disks of gas and dust and and ultimately that of course comes back also to the question how how we were formed we meaning our solar system and of course for that we cannot turn the clock back to see exactly what our young solar system looked like but we can definitely go to you know many nearby regions in which new stars are being born and new planets are being born and then look at these young systems and get a picture of what it will be now you talked actually about images but to me it's not going to be about the images it's really going to be about the spectra about getting the fingerprints of the material there for me actually one spectrum is worth a thousand images and that's yeah so tell us why why why why is the spectre so vital to the work you want to do that's because uh there in that you can really see what a material is out of which new solar systems are being uh formed and then you have to think about uh water but also about organic molecules like methane like carbon dioxide like acetylene hydrogen cyanide so there's all these molecules that have their fingerprints exactly in this mid infrared wavelength range and and it's not just one line we will see hundreds of lines there maybe thousands of lines of these molecules and we can can really then study them and model them tell how many there are of each of these molecules uh even more simple counts the elements that are there oxygen carbon nitrogen the elements out of which we are made ultimately um but we can also learn something about say about temperature um because we have so many lines the relative strengths of these lines tells us something about temperatures so so there's so much information that we can get out of these uh hundreds of lines so you know many of us teach courses for students on on various areas of astronomy physics i certainly have taught students about star formation about planet formation how well do we actually understand the details of those processes and and what what are the unknowns and and what do you what do you hope to resolve with the data yeah i mean that's it's a a topic that is still unfolding very much at this this moment because we now have the ability to look deep into these dusty clouds um next to the james webb space telescope that will be coming up also the atacama large millimeter array on the ground is is getting fantastic images now of planets flowing discs uh things that used to be just a blob that we can now actually resolve and we can see sort of the individual you know rings and and and cavities in these discs where planets are actually forming at this very moment so the the whole theory actually of planet formation is is undergoing a a revolution actually at this stage it's certainly not a smooth project it goes with all kinds of of humps and bumps in order to bring sort of these tiny little dust particles together into to grow something that is bigger and bigger and bigger and ultimately something like like earth so we're at a very interesting junction now and jwst will certainly provide its uh uh part of this this story it will be particularly well suited to look at the inner parts of the of the disk say in our own solar system out to where saturn is um so the inner region that's where we actually think that the bulk of the planets are being formed especially the earth-like planets um whereas the alma telescope is is very well suited to look at the outer colder regions so there's it could be a very interesting synergy here and then and bringing these two stories together and so where where are you going to initially look i mean where are you going to point the telescope is there a specific space that you've already chosen where you're going to focus yes yeah yeah yeah yeah we're going to go basically to the nearest regions in which new stars are being born they are say some 300 light years away so we're looking really close to home as close as possible to get the maximum sensitivity to get the maximum spatial resolution um so that's why we like to to look close by and from from precursor missions like the speech to space telescope that john mentioned earlier um sort of those pathfinders we have already an indication as sort of where to look and so our first targets are just going to be those where we we know we will get lots of signal uh but now we will be able to unravel that signal that used to be sort of a a single blurry feature will now start to resolve itself into to hopefully 50 or 100 lines um so so yes we have a whole program lined up for that and and so just to give us a sense of of the physics so you're looking within environments that are are very dusty dirty in some sense from the standpoint of the data that you want to receive in some clean manner why is it that the infrared will give you a clearer vision than anything that we've used before say in the visible or other parts of the spectrum yeah it's it's really basically the the extinction i mean think about it when there's a lot of smoke in the atmosphere you also know that you cannot look very far then it's basically these dust particles that absorb and scatter the radiation and that means that you cannot look very deep into a cloud at optical wavelengths the light that we see with our own eyes but if you go to the infrared part then a lot of that disappears and you can really start to penetrate into these uh these dusty clouds and so that is what makes it so powerful that's uh and so when does your when does your observing begin is it also early on in the mission or are you standing by he hopes we hope so we hope so um i mean miri is actually the the last instrument to be commissioned so the last two weeks of commissioning so we have to wait long for that to as the instrument team sort of to see the the first data and that the actual observations uh of the the the guaranteed time as we have as instrument builders but also the early release science projects they will actually be taken as as soon as possible after the launch and this data being made immediately public so so hopefully maybe by by june we'll get a first taste of what the data look like so you mentioned the early release programs so can you just give a sense of what those are and why it's been integrated into the mission yeah yeah i mean i'm sure that natalie can tell even more about those but they were really um planned in order to make sure that the entire community had data as soon as possible before the next call of the proposal so um we have had one call of proposals to the general public everybody basically being able to propose for that um and uh the next one has to be of course once the uh observatory is successfully launched but you can you know you need to know sort of what the real quality is of the data and in order to secure that that's basically why these early release programs were planned uh to be executed as as quickly as possible in the first few months uh data immediately released to the to the whole scientific community and and then they can use that for the next proposal call and so you mention the general public john is it the case that anybody can apply for time on on the space telescope yes absolutely we call for proposals about once a year and we received over 1100 proposals from many thousands of astronomers around the world and everyone's eligible to propose you still have to compete you have to write a good proposal but we got good proposals and we're very happy with them uh so anyone's able able to offer a proposal is there anyone that you have accepted who's not university-based oh i'm not sure about that um but i i can tell you that about 10 of the proposals were led by graduate students uh so people are very young and have great ideas and we're pleased to give them the data if i could jump in for one second just afraid that nasa will now be flooded with uh proposals is um it's important in proposals for people to usually recognize in the writers what is known what has been done before and what needs to be done and so i don't want to discourage anybody out there from having a great idea but it's always important to check whether your idea has been checked already before writing a proposal absolutely essential i i think you guys would hate me if all of a sudden a million proposals come in from all over the world so vina natalie both of you from 30 000 feet or maybe that's the wrong unit of measure for this conversation from a large distance are in this area of planet formation planet atmospheric planet structure do your groups talk to each other or is it that these projects are fairly siloed and everybody just uses the instrument for their particular purpose or is there a cross conversation that happens no no i mean i think there's there's definitely a connection between our topics and i think thanks to jdbst there will be more and more uh actually conversations between us because um one of the the the broader science goals is also whether in the mature planets that uh natalie is uh studying um whether say the composition of that atmosphere the amount of carbon and oxygen whether that tells you something about where that planet was formed where did it get its carbon and oxygen how much did it get and that's my part of the story because i'm looking at it in the very early stages and we're trying to link that how much of that material from the outer part of these these uh solar nebula these these these discs at which the planets form how much of that material goes from the outer disk into the inner disk and then makes it into a planetary atmosphere so it will be really fascinating i think in the uh you know after a few years of jwst to start to come to to link our data together and and see whether we can say something about how and where uh those planets were actually formed yeah there are some really key outstanding questions i mean if you go back to 1995 the very first exoplanet that was discovered right out the box was a huge surprise something as large as jupiter orbiting 10 times closer to its parent star than mercury is to our own sun how did it get there it defied everything that we knew about planet formation so the current thinking is that planets that the formation process is dynamic that the planets are gravitationally interacting with one another and with the disk from which they formed they can spiral inwards or drift outwards depending on the nature of those gravitational interactions so we want to test that hypothesis and avena is the alchemist she's getting all of the molecules together and telling us where those molecules are condensing out so that when we observe the atmospheres of these surprising hot jupiters we can look at the ratios of different species of molecules or elements and she'll tell us where that planet was formed and then from that we'll be able to confirm this hypothesis that indeed they formed farther out and then lost angular momentum and spiraled in so do we have a sense where our sun and initially formed is that something which we can say with any confidence well i mean certainly the question as to where did our jupiter originally formed i think that's a very current question at the moment did it form where it is located at this very moment or did it form much further out into the disk and then came inwards um and jupiter is very much enhanced in its oxygen uh in its nitrogen and where did it get that because as natalie said it's not just the gases it's it's really also the condensing out into isis that plays a huge role in this entire story and and that is actually where jwst excels because jb st can see not just the gases it can also see the isis and we can we can start actually in in some disks where we have a fortunate uh orientation and what is called an adjoin orientation we can really look at different lines of site actually through that disk we can see not just the gas but also the ices actually um that are part of the building blocks of these new planets so um so yes we're going to have a very exciting period there so based on what we know now i'm sorry natalie go ahead this is so important you know to be able to see the ices in a disk when we go out and we search for life we're going in search of water and we don't even have a clear understanding about where our planet earth got its oceans there was an idea that the oceans were delivered to us by the collisions of comets that came from the outer solar system but now that thinking is kind of changing maybe when earth formed there was already a lot of ice in the disk that got sequestered away into the rocks and then later was outgassed and precipitated down to form the oceans this is still an outstanding question so when we look at the discs from which the planets form and we can actually see ice in that disk it will help us to better understand where the water is and where the potential abodes of life will be so when you look at planet earth now and our solar system now is the general sense that we are an anomaly relative to other things that are more common out there or do you think that ultimately we're just going to be run of the mill it's too early to say i i've heard some scientists look at the kepler data and conclude that earth is anomaly an anomaly because of the diversity uh we see for example uh planetary systems in terms of architecture of systems we see what we call compact multis where you have a lot of planets orbiting very close to the star very tightly packed one close one next to the other we know that our own solar system all the planets orbit along a plane that is kind of a pancake shape these compact multis are so tightly packed and neatly arranged they're not a pancake they're more like a thin crepe so you know you it's tempting to conclude from that that the earth and the solar system are unique but the reality is that the kepler mission which has the most information about planetary demographics was not sensitive to an exact solar system analog for that we are going to need future missions that help to extend the demographic survey all the way out to orbits of jupiter and and to the smaller planets uh that are more like earth-sun analogs either of you willing to give a gut feel for whether there's life out there when i look at earth which is the only example we have of a living world i noticed that life got a toehold here at least microbial life immediately as soon as earth cooled enough so that oceans could pool on the surface so that water could pool on the surface of earth microbial life appeared all the building blocks were there you know we see amino acids in the interstellar medium those are the building blocks of proteins nucleic acids etc so all the building blocks are there microbial life started immediately so uh from that alone my gut feeling is that it's easy to create microbial life and that when the conditions are right it's going to happen and we know that there are billions of earth-like planets out in the galaxy kepler taught us that so so i think from that perspective yes and then if you asked me what about more complex life self-awareness for example multi-cellular life or even intelligence if you can define such a thing that i don't know because i look at this example of earth and i say well it took two billion years for eukaryotes to form these are the true the branch of the tree of life that humans are on so that required perhaps oxygen in the atmosphere as a result of billions of years of photosynthesis from algae on the on the surface maybe that means that more complex life is harder takes longer but that said there are stars in our galaxy that have been around for the entire age of the galaxy you know 11 12 billion years so i love to imagine what might happen on such a planet how life might evolve given 12 billion years yeah and had the dinosaurs not been wiped out have they not been wiped out who knows right we may uh either we might not be here talking or it might be a group of five dinosaurs talking to one another depending on how things uh evolve exactly so so john with such a a tight schedule because of the tight lifetime of the james webb space telescope is there a provision for responding to some unexpected exciting development where you kind of change the schedule reorient the telescope because we just have got to focus it upon something that we didn't expect to happen absolutely there is if you've got a reason to call us up and say i've got something exciting we know how to do that you call up the director of the space telescope science institute and you say what your idea is and we'll get together and talk about it so we think it takes us about two days to go through that human process of deciding and then sending up the commands to the observatory so yes indeed if a interstellar comet comes through and we think it's real yes we can go look at it or if we think uh something new is going to crash into jupiter yes we can go look at it yes great so we've all we've been talking a lot about the power of the james webb telescope adam when you think about your own research program let's say things go maximally well with the web telescope what next i mean is there a new instrument beyond that that would be particularly well suited to the kinds of things that you focus your attention on right i think one of the lessons of the hubble space telescope is that you have these ideas of you know this is the investigation we're going to do just like this and then at least half of the most significant discoveries that came from hubble we're not even on the drawing board we're not in anybody's proposal the first year we're not part of the way the telescope was designed to do something and so you know it's very difficult you know as they say to make predictions particularly about the future um you know it depends what we learn and inevitably you know it will require some clever utilization of the instruments or the you know the different capabilities we have and so for that reason i think nasa has always done a very good job and and esa to make sure we sort of cover the whole spectrum from you know different wavelengths to different resolutions you know maybe x-rays maybe gamma rays maybe infrared because you know it's hard to know which of our senses is going to be the most critical one to tell us the next thing and so yes depending on what we find it might be gravitational waves in my instance um that you know allow us a completely independent way to look at the expansion of the universe to tease out you know whatever it is that's going on yeah and so john even uh having both been involved in in webb since the uh earliest thinking about the project you know what it takes to to gather a consortium of of scientists and engineers to get the funding and so forth so with that kind of lead time i hear it's 25 years from like start to launch are you thinking about that next device now is it already under development or in the planning phase well actually we do have the next one under development it's called the nancy grace roman space telescope and it's thought we might launch it in 2026 or so so that's not so far off it's well along and it was conceived quite a long time ago and it has a special concentration on looking for his signs of the dark matter in the dark energy so it's special for that and it will cover a lot of sky because it has the ability to take 100 times as much sky at one bite as the hubble can do so something rare and unusual may turn up so that's an example of what adam's mentioning that we don't honestly know what the future will hold because nature has given us something that will be surprising after that we have lots and lots of ideas four great observatories were proposed to be evaluated by the national academy of sciences review panel called the decadal survey so in a very short time we expect to know what they said and then we have some idea about which of these things we may do next but from my perspective we probably need them all and it'll take us a long time to build them but yes great things are coming if i can interject sometimes what really helps us is having some of these capabilities working at the same time because some of them like this the nancy grace roman telescope is a wide angle telescope so it's kind of a finder scope if you will whereas when we find interesting things in the infrared that it can find we'll follow it up with the james webb space telescope provided that it's working at the same time and so you know one of the beauties is you know really we're heading into this golden age i think of astronomy where we will have you know hubble and the roman telescope and jwst and large ground-based telescopes all working sort of in synergy because they each have a different kind of superpower that allows us to sort of do whatever it is this science investigation needs and so looking back over the past 25 years john even all of you really are there lessons learned regarding mistakes that were made in the development of the james webb space telescope that will inform future missions in a manner that you know say will keep the development time shorter that maybe even keep budgets tighter anything of that sort that emerged oh my goodness well i think we certainly saw that early ambitions for the price and this time scale of the web telescope were just wrong uh we were very ambitious and uh and hopeful and um and with we might have made some better plans if we weren't quite so ambitious and hopeful right away uh so we certainly know that we don't or at least at that time we did not really know how to plan well enough so current uh ideas are much more carefully examined to say well i don't believe that number how about being more cautious so that's a big lesson the other lesson is be ambitious anyway because it's going to take a long time whatever it is and it better be worth all that effort so don't just make a thing that's a little bit different make something that's really spectacular and then you'll be proud of it because nobody else can ever do it the same as you can so that's what these new great observatories are scheduled to do if when we finally build them they will be far beyond what we've got today so vina natalie how about both of you for your research programs the next phase and natalie already made reference to the need for another instrument to go beyond even what james will be able to do what do you envision well you made the reference or when you were talking about an earth and its very thin atmosphere and i i mentioned how just a tiny fraction of photons will filter through that atmosphere and take with it the chemical fingerprint it is very tiny i mean the scale height of an of a terrestrial atmosphere is like five kilometers so a tiny planet transiting in front of a star is taking out one ten thousandth of the light of the star and then the atmosphere that thin atmosphere is one two hundredth of that so it's a very tiny signal that we have to tease out of the data what i really want in order to be able to see biosignatures is i want all of the light that's reflecting off of the surface of the planet and in order to see that you need direct imaging so we want a telescope that is capable of very accurately blocking out the starlight as if you were holding up your thumb in the sky and you could block out the starlight so that you could see the very faint planets reflecting and emitting light in orbit around that star and you have to do that very carefully because those planets are about 10 billion times fainter than the star that they orbit but once we can do that we will have more photons that we can collect we will play the same game we will spread them out into a rainbow and we will scrutinize those those features those chemical fingerprints in the light but with a bigger telescope that has higher sensitivity and very good star suppression technology we will have the capability of detecting biosignatures like oxygen from photosynthesis for dozens of planets and this is one of the ideas that has been studied in great detail and is on on up for consideration by the decadal survey that we'll hear from at the at the end of this month and if we had strong evidence if these biomarkers were to to really hit us in the face in either the james webb or future missions can you ima what will the impact be on on on life on planet earth oh man just another copernican revolution i mean humans have been asking the question are we alone since the dawn of time since humans first existed since the first human looked up at the sky and wondered what was out there or saw a parallel between those faint points of light and our own sun so i i think that looking up into the sky and not feeling that existential cosmic loneliness but knowing that every point of light you see is not just a star but a planetary system above you know abounding with life that is going to fundamentally change how we see our place in the universe vino how about you in the next next mission that you would imagine beyond this what what what in the best of all worlds what would that be yeah well first of all i think uh if any new mission needs to go for this this big jump forward so i fully agree with john and and and adam that you need to be ambitious and and make a uh create a discovery space so to say because uh you know a significant fraction of the results are going to be dosed that we didn't expect and that's actually the thrill of the the discoveries uh that we're gonna get and and that is because we're opening up so much new parameter space um where we may find things that we we hadn't even imagined so so that's the first lesson i think for for any new uh telescope and the other is is like like natalie said jwst is not a life-finding mission we really need another mission for that we are actually now the first generation of humans that actually has the technology in order to do that because we indeed need to be able to separate the light from that tiny little planet from the the mother star so this direct imaging and direct imaging and spectroscopy of of those earth-like planets and then looking for the designs of life so that is an enormous technology development that is ongoing at this moment but it's now reaching sort of the maturity stage that you can start to think about a uh next mission you know it will be still decades before that would be launched but again it's the the excitement that we are now having the capability in principle to to start design that and and do that and that that will be uh really transformative of course in the in the results uh that we would get done somebody has one final question to all of you oh no go ahead can i add one yeah please absolutely go ahead just to add one more thing you you asked how does this impact humans every time we look outwards and push frontiers we always end up turning inwards as well as we look for life beyond the solar system we have to consider the conditions under which life could arise in order to pinpoint the most likely abodes of life so we consider the extremes and when we do that we learn something about the sustainability of life right here on planet earth searching for other planets makes me love this one all the more it makes me appreciate it and want to protect life it makes me realize how valuable the rise of this complexity in the universe is and makes me want to protect it so i think that that's a very very important impact on humanity the search for life helps us to understand how we humans can survive to the to the deep future yeah it's a deeply important message and one that actually does take us to the final question that i wanted to ask which i'm happy if each of you would be willing to chime in it's a question i get asked a lot i i know probably that you must get asked a lot too and it has to do with money right when we look at the the price tag on the telescope you know i don't know what it is but people kick around the number 10 billion dollars one response is look on the scales of of government funding over the length of time over which the money is spent that's actually not that much money but 10 billion certainly sounds like a lot of money so adam what is your response when people say hey is it should we be spending that amount of taxpayer money on this kind of an endeavor right um you know it's difficult to pick and choose any individual investigation telescope and say you know this one or this one but you know what i speak to more is this process of learning about the natural world you know following our curiosity and questioning the basic laws of the universe i mean as you know when einstein was trying to understand gravity you know he didn't imagine he was going to come up with the technology to do uh gps in our phone to locate us i'm sure everybody here on the planet is thrilled that we have it but you know when we we fund basic research curiosity-driven research and when we pursue uh trying to understand the universe we learn things that uh eventually they show up in our technology eventually they better our lives but you know like any sort of investment you make some you make in the sort of high risk high reward category and i think you know uh these telescopes sit squarely in that sort of category and i think a healthy society will always make those investments because they want to continue to grow john any any thoughts on the argument for spending the sums that we do on these kinds of seemingly esoteric sounding scientific explorations yeah sure well um i draw my inspiration from the idea that among other things we are proving that we can do amazing things so when we say that telescope looks impossible to build well we say well we did build it it probably will work well because we did what we're supposed to do so it will survive launch so it's a demonstration that humanity can pull together to do complex things if it really wants to so i'm very appreciative that we were able to do that and i say also you know we're now as i say we're reading the book of nature and putting it into the books of man so we're putting our information into the library that will last forever and uh that's information that cannot be lost so i'm so proud that we're able to do that as a species fantastic vienna any any thoughts or do you have an argument that you give in response to that query that you must get yes so i mean certainly whenever you talk to the general public from very young the children to to old they are hugely interested in these big questions of are we alone um what is the nature of the universe um and it drives that curiosity i mean you see it it also attracts sort of children to the natural sciences not necessarily to astronomy but it gets them into sciences and that's also what our society needs it needs sort of these bright minds that are curious because that actually is a driver for for innovation but also more generally i think it's it's part of our human nature indeed to ask the biggest questions to be curious that's that's what makes us human you know what if as a society we wouldn't be asking these biggest questions anymore what does that tell us about our society we would be very inward looking by by looking at astronomy by looking at at the universe by you looking at you know planets where there may be life um it makes us very humble also um provides some humility some modesty i would say we are only living on the tiny little planets there out out in the the big universe we live on a beautiful planet we need to take good care of it that's also one of the messages that that we can give um but but in the end it gives us perspective really of where we are in this this universe that makes you know a lot of the conflicts and and other issues that we're having in society it puts them in perspective and and maybe they're not as important to to argue about as as we think they are so i always like to say that you know we are we are all world citizens under the same beautiful sky and uh that is a message that we definitely want to give to the to the public yeah beautiful and vital perspective natalie want to take us out with final words on why it is that we do what we do i would argue i i live my life as a scientist with this idea that all the mysteries of the universe are knowable and that motivates me you know what what is the limit of our knowledge and i would say maybe there is no limit so what else is there yet to learn that will fundamentally change my understanding of my place in the universe and why i exist the this this exploration gives meaning to my life and gives me comfort that everything is exactly as it should be and i'm a vital part of that and everything is connected and you can't put a price tag on that i agree and this conversation i hope will make everyone who's watching also feel a vital part of this new era of exploration discovery which is who we are as a species so december 2021 is the launch we will be waiting anxiously to hear how that goes and we'll also be waiting with baited breath for the results that will start pouring in from all the research that you will be spearheading as well as our other scientific colleagues around the world so it's an exciting time and thank you so much for taking the time out to discuss the james webb space telescope with us here today thank you [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 2,451,125

Keywords: James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, Brian Greene, NASA, Space launch, JWST launch, What is JWST?, infrared telescope, Hubble, space telescope, sunshield, Goddard Space Flight Center, Near InfraRed Camera, pictures of the universe, John Mather, Natalie Batalha, Adam Riess, Ewine van Dishoeck, World, Science, Festival, Big Ideas Series, New York City, Kavli prize, exoplanets, SpaceX, astrophysics, cosmology, Astrochemistry, Official NASA Broadcast, #UnfoldTheUniverse, The Matrix Resurrections

Id: WtjkNsnC--A

Length: 81min 3sec (4863 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/morningreis]

Amazing telescope and I'm excited to see what kind of images it's going to beam back. I was disappointed to hear though that it is only being designed with a 10 year lifespan though because of the fuel it uses for its boosters to reposition. The plan is to develop some means to refuel it, but I'm thinking that is going to be an order of magnitude harder than the original project

[u/mr_ji]

Let's get it working first.