Across the long history of science,
no single instrument has transformed human vision
like the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble has spent 25 years
whirling around our planet,
watching stars explode and planets form.
The Hubble has revealed a new world,
but it has also left us with burning questions.
We still don't know if we are alone in this universe.
And we don't know if this universe is alone,
or if it is one of many.
But help is on the way.
NASA's engineers have spent two decades
designing and building a new space telescope.
A behemoth with 100 times
Hubble's seeing power.
And now, with just thirty months until launch,
it's finally being pieced together,
just outside Washington, D.C.
in the largest cleanroom on earth.
Ok, so light comes into this telescope
from the sky way over here,
bounces off this big concave mirror
which is made out of 18 gold-covered hexagons,
and it focuses up to a spot right about here.
Then it's intercepted by a little convex mirror right there,
and bounces back into this
instrument package back here.
That's where we turn the lightwaves into pictures,
an advanced version of what you have in your cellphone,
except it picks up infrared light instead of visible light.
The big shiny thing that you see here is actually an
umbrella that protects the telescope from the sunshine.
In this model, the sunshine comes up from below,
and none of it ever shines on the telescope.
SPF, the sun protection factor
of this sunshade is about a million,
so it would keep you from getting a sunburn.
Being cold, it enables us to pick up extremely
small amounts of heat.
So, for instance, if there were a bumble bee
orbiting around there at the distance of the moon,
we would be able to pick up the heat
of that bumble bee at the distance of the moon
with this telescope.
There's a lot about the area of galaxy evolution
that we sort of pushed to the limits
of what Hubble can do,
and so this telescope is going to be able to teach us
so much more about that area of astronomy.
In the whole story of galaxy evolution,
we are really missing a really critical piece of that story,
which is the very first galaxies
that were formed after the Big Bang.
With Hubble, we're able to look back,
and see pretty far back into the universe,
but we have reached a point
where we can't see any further.
And to see those very first galaxies
that were born after the Big Bang,
we need infrared light,
and the Webb Telescope will
see the universe in infrared light,
and will allow us to literally see
the universe light up with those first galaxies.
Those first stars in those first galaxies were huge,
they were massive,
and they lived their lives very, very quickly,
and very quickly blew up.
The products that came out of those exploded stars
were what seeded the universe with the materials
that would make the next generation of stars,
and ultimately planets and people like ourselves.
In the most fundamental sense,
Webb is all about origins.
It's about the origins of galaxies
and the origins of life.
Sometimes as scientists, as analytical astronomers,
we kind of shy away from saying
we are searching for life,
but that's what we're doing.
This telescope, I really believe, is the next step
in that search for life in the universe.
It's still an open question if we are alone.
That's a really hard question,
but we're now getting to where
we could begin to answer it.
We can already know what apparatus to build,
so we can find out if other planets are alive.
When I grew up, people were asserting
without proof that we must be unique,
that we must be alone in the universe.
And then, all these discoveries came in science,
and said, no, planets are common.
The Webb Telescope wasn't
originally designed to study planets,
but we found out right away that we could study them,
because they do one thing not commonly,
but frequently enough:
a planet will go between the telescope and the star,
so it'll cast a shadow, and some of the starlight
will go through the planet's atmosphere on
its way to the telescope.
We can analyze that and determine
the chemistry of that atmosphere way out there.
With the Webb Telescope,
we calculate, we should be able to see water vapor
in the atmosphere of an earth-like planet
around a small version of the sun.
In a few years, we might be able to tell you that we
found one and it has enough water to have an ocean.
That would be cool.
Once it reaches orbit,
the Webb will perform reverse origami,
unfurling its sunshade and its 18 gold-coated mirrors,
transforming itself into the largest space observatory
in the known universe.
We're actually putting this thing together,
and testing it right now,
and it's becoming a reality really fast.
Every now and then, you get the chance to reflect
and you're like, wow, this is pretty neat
to be working on this thing
It's also a little bit terrifying,
because we've all worked on this for a long time,
and we're pushing the envelope in a lot of ways,
and we've got to make sure it works.
You're in the cleanroom, you're in a bunny suit,
you're working with the techs,
and you look around, and you think,
wow, my gloved hand just touched something
that is going to be out in deep space.
Early on, it didn't have the same palatable excitement
that you have now.
You do have to step back and remind yourself
that what you're standing a few feet away from
might change the way we look at the universe.
One of my coworkers took the age of his children
when he first started working James Webb,
and I think one was, you know, 5 years old,
and then 15 years later, he took another picture
at this review were at, and he said:
"Look at when I started, how old my kids were,
and now one is 20 years old, in college.
At times, it seemed as though the Webb might not
make it to the launch pad.
The telescope's design and development phases
were plagued by delays and cost overruns.
And in 2011, several members of Congress
called for its cancellation.
Folks who were working on the project, they said:
"Four years, that's a long time."
But, when you take a step back, 4 years to get the results
that have been traveling for 13.4 billion years,
that's nothing.
What you see behind us, make no mistake about it,
this is hard.
Webb is a technological revolution.
NASA had to invent ten technologies just to build it,
and I think that with this telescope
that we really are sort of on the precipice,
we're on the edge of learning new and amazing
things about our universe,
things that we haven't even dreamed of yet.