[Dan Clery] It was such a high profile and expensive mission.
They just couldn't afford to fail.
[Marcia Rieke] Something like 10,000 people in 14 different
countries have contributed to making the project happen.
[Dan Clery] The Breakthrough of the Year is a prize where we
pick the bit of science that has made
the biggest impact that year.
The topic we decided on for this year is the
James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST as we normally call it.
It sees the universe in an entirely new way.
[Dan Clery] They first started talking about what
the next mission would be back in 1989.
So that was before Hubble even left the ground.
[Announcer] The Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe.
[Dan Clery] That really solidified some years later
when Hubble first created a deep field image.
They found that this empty bit of sky was full of galaxies,
and they realized they could see much further back into the
history of the universe than people had thought.
So astronomers needed an infrared telescope to be able to
study these galaxies and see a lot of them.
[Marcia Rieke] Where JWST wins over Hubble is by being able to
observe at much longer Infrared wavelengths.
Hubble has got sort of one six the collecting area of JWST.
Hubble can't see the most distant galaxies
without that infrared component.
[Dan Clery] Infrared is also important for studying exoplanets.
[Natalie Batalha] A mission like Kepler measures
a bunch of colors jumbled together like white light.
JWST provides us with this new way of looking at exoplanets by
studying the constituents and the properties of their atmospheres.
It's looking at these dimmings of light in hundred of colors
all at once in the infrared.
[Dan Clery] To do the science that they wanted to do required
technologies that had never been done before in a space telescope.
So the cost estimate kept going up.
The launch date kept getting pushed back.
In 2011, Congress threatened to cancel the whole project.
[Zoe Lofgren] Also, I think there’s a fundamental question
not for me, but for the country at large,
including some of our colleagues, of why we’re doing this.
[Dan Clery] It was, you know, definitely threatened
and on life support for a little while.
Congress gave it a reprieve, but they set an absolute budget
maximum and a firm deadline and NASA had to keep to that.
[Dan Clery] It sort of defies the imagination that you could get
this thing into space because it looked so huge.
Then there was the long process of loading it into a container,
and putting it on a ship and sending it to French Guinana,
where it was launched on an Ariane rocket
from the European Space Agency.
[Announcer] And liftoff! Décollage! James Webb being a voyage begins a voyage
back to the birth of the universe.
[Dan Clery] From the moment of launch,
which was on Christmas day, it all just seemed to go perfectly.
There were something around 350 passible failures
where a single object could fail and it would
cripple some part of the mission.
[Marcia Rieke] The fact that so much stuff was out of my
control meant that I wasn't as anxioud as I might have been.
[Natalie Batalha] I did feel very nervous.
I couldn't really fathom that everything would work.
When you're pushing technology, and you're doing something for
the very first time, there's always the unexpected.
[Dan Clery] As they were commissioning it up in space
while it was on its way to its station,
they were ticking those off.
[Announcer] And we have a fully deployed JWST observatory
They were getting more and more relaxed as time went by.
[Natalie Batalha] It wasn't until July that we actually got a peek
at the very first data.
We saw the spectrum from the atmosphere
a planet called WASP-96b.
And we were watching this on NASA TV, but simultaneously
we were running the calculations from the simulator
that we used before Webb launched.
We're looking at the dots on the screen and the error bars,
and we compare them to what we saw on our computers
and they matched almost exactly.
That's when I knew that JWST was going to deliver on its promise.
That it was going to give us to give us precision.
It means that everything we proposed to do with the telescope
in just the first year we were going to be able to do.
Right after the release of those early observations,
our first exoplanet was observed.
We saw carbon the dioxide. We saw carbon monoxide,
and then we saw this molecule, sulfur dioxide.
The first detection of a molecule in an exoplanet.
that also requires photochemistry.
[Dan Clery] The very first image that was released
was this deep field image.
JWST was pointed at an empty patch of sky
and left looking at it for I think 12 and a half hours.
Now, remember that Hubble Deep Field images took hundreds of hours.
Scientists have found some of the most distant galaxies
that have ever been seen in the infrared in that first image.
So it was already groundbreaking when it came out.
I think it's gonna be incredibly exciting
what we can learn about the very earliest galaxies in the universe.
[Marcia Rieke] It's just amazing how once you start observing
in the infrared how galaxies pop out.
The infrared can cut through some of the interstellar dust
and show you stuff that you just can't see with Hubble.
The parts of JWST are all working better than we could have hoped.
The original requirement for the JWST lifetime was five years
with a goal of ten years.
By using less fuel during the launch and ascent part,
that means there’s more fuel left for the station keeping.
The station keeping fuel looks like it could easily last 20 to 25 years.
[Natalie Batalha] Knowing that the spacecraft will last for 20 years,
you're talking about hundreds, maybe even over a thousand
exoplanets that will have atmospheric diagnostics.
That will tell us a lot about how planets form and evolve.
[Dan Clery] Whenever people who have built a new
and better instrument, they've always discovered things
that they didn't even imagine.
Having the sort of information they're getting now,
which they've never had before is going to bring huge advances.
It's just going to have such a transformative effect on astronomy.