This is the picture we've
all been waiting for.
The deepest image of the cosmos
ever captured.
Humanity has never seen so far back
and so clearly into the depths
of the universe's history.
The multitudes of nameless galaxies
you see here, emitted their light
more than 13 billion years ago, mere cosmic moments
after the Big Bang.
This one image
and the countless others that come
has been the result
of more than two decades
of focused efforts
by some of the world's
greatest scientists and engineers.
From concept to construction and testing,
from launch
to deployment and commissioning
the frigid depths of space
from opening its new eyes
on the cosmos, to gathering
and processing the data
to ensure
it sees more clearly than ever before.
30 years from now,
when we look back
at the most amazing science from Webb,
half of it's
going to be what we plan to do,
but half of it's going to be
some really fascinating science
that we haven't even yet thought of.
Those are just the first images.
Think about the many years of images
and other things we're going to learn
with this telescope
about potentially habitable planets.
We're going to learn
a lot of that over time,
not just the first images.
And I just
I can't get my head
around what it might be.
Our time machine
is the
James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
A one of a kind
observatory built
to unveil how the universe first began
to shine and much, much more.
The first year of Webb's
science is going to be very exciting.
The programs that we have been planning
for 20 years,
most of them will be executed
during this first year
to see the first light in the universe,
the first galaxies that formed.
We will probe the atmospheres of planets
around other stars.
We will get our first
look at the surface
chemistry of objects in our solar system
that are just too faint
for our current telescopes to see.
The science is going to flow
and it will be amazing.
It's the largest,
most ambitious space telescope ever made.
And promises to produce
some of the most incredible
discoveries of our lifetime and beyond.
The Big Bang happened
13.8 billion years ago.
And then the Hubble
sees back to roughly 13.5 billion years.
But they see all these galaxies.
How did you go from nothing to galaxies?
Something must have happened,
but we can't see into that period.
It's designed to peer
into a part of the universe
we have never seen before.
The so-called dark ages,
when everything must have happened,
when the first galaxies came
to existence,
the first stars came into life.
The first black holes appeared.
Over time, as the space time
continuum stretched
with the expansion of the universe,
the light itself was stretched.
As that light has crossed
the universe, it's gotten redder
and it's been on its way for 13
and a half billion years.
Which is why it had to be infrared,
because it had to push beyond
what the Hubble Space Telescope could see.
Traditional telescopes have
mirrors and lenses and things,
and they're encased in tubes.
The tubes radiate warmth.
Any structure
you have is, by nature, warm.
Just because sunlight falling on it
warms it up.
If it's warm, it gives off its own heat.
Well, for an infrared telescope,
we have to sort of switch off
that light of the telescope.
And we do that by cooling it
all the way down to this -380
degrees Fahrenheit.
So the telescope vanishes.
Those considerations
are what drove us
to have this exposed mirror
and spindly secondary
and giant sun shields.
All of that is designed
to keep the telescope
and its mirrors as cold as possible.
We can actually detect the heat
of a bumblebee
if it was flying around
on the surface of the moon.
But that's how sensitive
this telescope is.
As long as we can get
the telescope itself
cooled all the way down
to this -380 degrees
to this cryogenic temperature.
I have to admit, in my early days,
I laughed a lot
because we didn't know how to do this.
So those early days were really just
figuring out what technologies
needed to be invented.
What didn't exist at the time.
And then laying those out
in a systematic fashion of
how do we go from
this doesn't exist, to this does exist.
JWST’s starlight-catching 6.5-meter segmented mirror
is more than the observatory’s eye;
the mirror is really its heart —
The most vital central part
that gives life to the whole.
Nothing quite like it has ever
been made before,
or is likely to be made again.
In both form and function,
it is not so much a mirror
as it is a monument to the great things
humans can do
when we come together
in pursuit of pure discovery.
When you think of the level of precision
that's in this entire thing,
it did not want to exist,
and it really took sheer will.
That's been a real privilege
for me, is to be able to watch, you know,
some incredibly talented
people just pour
their entire energy into this
and almost will it into being.
There are actuators on each segment
that can shift its position
in curvature by millimeters
all the way down to a few thousandths
the width of a human hair.
Altogether,
they will ensure that 18
primary segments are aligned
as though they're a
single monolithic mirror.
It's essentially
like having 18 separate telescopes
because the 18 segments
are initially pointing
in different directions.
They all share a secondary mirror,
but each of the segments
is a unique eye on the sky.
These mirrors are complicated.
Each primary
mirror segment has seven actuators,
Six of them move the segment has a rigid body
tipping and tilting,
moving forward and back,
even slightly rotating,
giving each segment
six degrees of freedom.
This mirror had to be so smooth,
that if you stretched the whole mirror out
across the Atlantic,
you could have no wave
bigger than roughly
three quarters of an inch.
So that's how smooth this had to be.
But it had to be that smooth
at -308 degrees Fahrenheit -
not room temperature.
Every material bends and twists.
We take it from room temperature,
and you cool it all the way down
to this incredibly cold
cryogenic temperature, as we call it.
So the only way we could do
this is each segment,
we actually had to polish it incorrectly.
What we did was we published it perfectly
at room temperature.
We cooled it all the way down.
It would then bend and twist.
We'd measure all those bends and twists
very carefully,
warm it back up,
and then polish in all those errors
so that when it cooled down
again, it cooled
to exactly the right shape.
That turned out to be quite
a tough thing to do.
And we had to have this
big test chamber
built specially in the Marshall Space
Flight Center.
We had to have the right material
that it would actually
predictably bend back to the right shape.
You know, that was called cryo
polishing, which actually meant was
we have to polish it wrong,
but perfectly wrong.
So when it cools, it
bent back to exactly the right shape.
So when we put
all these segments together
and then we used electronics
and actuators
to line it up,
we could get this
incredibly smooth six meter primary
that will give us the
image quality we're looking for.
JWST will see further
and more clearly into the past
than any observatory
that has come before,
Yet it is really a facility
for the future.
It will be an engine of discovery
for the next generation of scientists
opening new windows on the universe.
Everything - nominal is my new favorite word
that’s what I kept saying.
Every time they said nominal.
Yes! Yes! To myself.
Oh!
I suspect they're going to come up
with some questions
that we haven't even thought to ask yet.
We have set this foundation,
but it's actually going to be others
who are going to carry
the science forward now.
Oh, whoa, oh, there it is!
Beauty!
Oh, my gosh.
Look at all this stuff folded up.
JWST may find the first evidence
that just as life arose here,
it did out there, too.
Could one telescope rewrite
every chapter of our textbooks
about the universe?
It's time to find out.
Oh, I think it's going to change the way
we see the universe dramatically,
no question about that.
A lot of the science
and I think the discoveries
that come are going to be things
we haven't even thought about yet.
The folks like me
who have been working on this program
for decades, our time is designed to span
the full suite of science capabilities.
When do black holes form?
What happens when black holes
form in the centers of galaxies?
How do those black holes
interact with the gas
and the stars in those galaxies?
How does that change the galaxy?
How does it change the black hole?
How does that alter
how light gets out and radiates
the rest of the universe?
There will be science
related to exoplanets
and looking at some of the nearest
and brightest exoplanets to try to probe
the atmospheres of those exoplanets.
When we first found exoplanets,
we assumed
it will look like the Earth
or like our solar system.
What we discovered no,
all those exoplanets
come from a whole wide variety
of different solar systems,
a huge diversity,
far more than our original models
told us were possible.
And there will be observations
within our solar system as well.
Looking at the great red spot of Jupiter,
looking at distant
Kuiper Belt
objects to figure out
what their surface chemistry is.
All of that
science is all going to happen
in the first year of Webb's operations.
It's going to be really exciting.
Piercing the darkness
to reveal the very first light
is only the beginning.
Billions of dollars and
lifetimes of work
have brought us to this historic moment
as the science of JWST begins.
But all this is only the very first step
on a journey of discovery
that will take us from the first rays
of cosmic dawn to the very ends of the universe.
What mysteries and treasures
await us along the way?
And the untold depths of the sky?
We're about to find out.