- When you think about chemistry,
odds are that your brain comes up with images
of people in lab coats working in kind of
a sterile laboratory environment with beakers
and catalysts and compounds,
but how on earth do you actually perform
chemistry experiments when you're talking about objects
billions of miles away?
Astro chemists don't have the luxury of being able
to take samples of the things that they're trying
to analyze.
And you're going to learn
about the really fascinating way
that the chemistry of space is actually based entirely
on what can be observed.
So, we're going to talk to one of the scientists
that's working with the James Webb Space Telescope Program
to find out exactly how she and others like her
have created chemical profiles based entirely
on what they can see.
While visiting NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
we got scientist, Stefanie Milam
to help us understand how all of this chemistry
and science of space works
and to get a sense on how learning about the chemistry
of far distant space and studying the science
of what we can see far away can really impact life
right here on Earth.
- My role for JWST is to make sure that we
have this massive, huge astrophysics observatory
that looks for the farthest stars in the Universe
and try to point it at the fastest moving, brightest objects
in the sky, which include the bodies of the Solar System.
So, instead of going to a laboratory and using beakers
and microscopes and studying chemistry in a lab,
I get to use telescopes or space observatories
to study chemistry in space.
So, I look for different molecules.
I look for signatures of them,
and by studying the different molecules
and their different abundances and temperatures,
we actually learn about the chemistry
that's happening in space.
So, the tool I use as opposed to wet chemistry
or high analytical instruments that most chemists use,
is I use spectroscopy.
So, every molecule has a fingerprint.
Just like you have a distinguishable fingerprint from me,
so does every molecule.
So, what we do, is we're studying the fingerprints
of these given molecules in different environments.
So, once we have the full fingerprint,
we know exactly how much of that molecule is there,
how hot or cold it is,
whether it's in a solid phase or a gas phase,
and then we can actually put all together
all the different fingerprints
and sort of build up a chemical network
and see what's actually going on.
But with JWST, we can do basically everything
in the Solar System from Mars on out.
That's just because of the sun shield.
We can't point towards the Earth or the moon
or Venus or Mercury,
but everything from near-Earth asteroids
to comets to the ice giants
to the gas giants, their moons.
We can see volcanoes on moons.
We can study atmospheric effects and the outer planets.
We're even going to get to observe Pluto,
just as New Horizons just did and its moons.
What I'm hoping to achieve with this mission
is we can do very detailed compositional studies
that we can't do from the ground.
And actually, one of the best objects for JWST
are comets or icy bodies in the outer Solar System.
We just don't really have access with any observatory
here on the ground.
Hopefully, we'll be able to determine what the composition
of these small, icy bodies are.
They're actually the relics of when our solar system formed,
so they're considered little pieces of history
that are frozen,
and every once in a while,
they happen to fly close enough to us
that we can observe them from the ground.
But with JWST, we can actually observe them
in their own environment,
sort of at a very distant, you know,
out beyond Pluto and Neptune.
So, getting the composition of those will really tell us
what was happening whenever our solar system formed.
And if we can get the chemistry of that
and see if that chemistry's ubiquitous across the Universe
and the Galaxy,
that means that we have the same organic chemistry here,
in our own solar system, as we do
in other solar systems.
- Now you know about the amazing stuff
that you can actually discover simply by looking
at objects far, far distant from our world
with an object like the James Webb Space Telescope.
So, if you're interested in experiments and science
just like this,
you can absolutely follow us at Now.HowStuffWorks.com
because we're going to be following the work
of the James Webb Space Telescope
as well as other cool space science.
We hope you join us.