The day before Christmas the James Webb Telescope took off from a spaceport in French Guiana,
known for having the highest percentage of successful launches at more than 95% since
the 1970’s, or as a location in Battlefield 2042.
The promise of the James Webb Telescope has always been just over the horizon.
Since an iteration of the telescope was first conceived in 1989, the road to the launchpad
has been paved with cost overruns and technical issues.
NASA originally envisioned a launch somewhere between 2007 and 2011, for a total cost between
1 billion and 3.5 billion dollars.
But the James Webb Telescope continued to miss one launch date after the next, while
its total cost ballooned to nearly 10 billion.
With astronomers and science lovers' hopes and dreams being carried to space along with
it, it’s worth asking, who gets to control the world's most powerful telescope?
A literal time machine into the very early days of our universe’s existence.
So, who makes the call on where it looks?
While NASA put the telescope in orbit, the Space Telescope Science Institute, a consortium
of 47 US institutions that operate telescopes and observatories around the world is the
body that chooses who gets to use it.
Just a side note for our video, the Space Telescope Science Institute is a fancy name,
but it’s a bit of a mouthful, so we’ll be referring to it simply as the Institute.
The James Webb Telescope was first set to launch more than a decade ago, but the Institute
waited a long time before figuring out the schedule for the telescope's first year.
Even with all this patience, they did have a few false starts along the way.
When it seemed like the telescope would be ready to launch in 2019, the Institute called
on astronomers to submit their proposals by March 2018.
Then just a week before the deadline, NASA announced that the telescope wouldn’t launch
until 2020.
The deadline was abruptly canceled and after another postponement came in March of 2020,
astronomers turned in their proposals by November 24th, two days before Thanksgiving.
Then it was time for the Institute to sift through the 1,173 proposal requests they had
received for the observatory’s first year of life — known as Cycle 1.
The telescope promises the ability to peer into the recesses of the universe like never
before.
That’s because the telescope is the closest thing humanity has ever built to a working
time machine.
Sporting a 21-foot-wide gold-plated mirror, the James Webb Telescope will be able to see
infrared light with incredible sensitivity.
It’ll be able to see objects that are 10 to 100 times fainter than what the Hubble
Space Telescope can see.
If you set the James Webb Telescope down on the surface of the Earth, and there wasn’t
all this pesky atmosphere in the way, it could detect the thermal signature of a bumble bee
on the Moon.
It will gather light from stars and galaxies located up to 13.6 billion light-years away
— light that has taken 13.6 billion years to reach the telescope’s mirrors.
Since the Universe is thought to be roughly 13.8 billion years old, we’ll be observing
galaxies that formed just 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang.
Our Universe was in its infancy then, and the James Webb Telescope will be providing
us with the baby photos.
To help sort through all the proposals, the Institute created 18 panels with 10 scientists
each tasked with looking over proposals for different areas of space research.
To eliminate as much bias as possible, the process was “dual anonymous.”, meaning
that the people writing the proposals had no idea who would be evaluating them, and
the people on the committee had no idea whose proposals they were analyzing.
As a result, 30 percent of the winning proposals are led by women, and scientists studying
for their PhDs also saw more success in getting their ideas approved.
The panels ranked the proposals based on three criteria.
From the onset, the science had to be nothing short of revolutionary, so the first two criteria
the committee looked for was how much the proposal would impact knowledge within the
selected subfield and how much it would advance astronomy in general.
Obviously what’s deemed most interesting is science that is considered transformational,
something will change our view of the universe.
In 1965, two American radio astronomers accidentally discovered cosmic microwave background radiation
emanating from all parts of the sky.
Now it was an accident, but what they had just discovered was a faint glow of light
that fills the universe, falling on the Earth from every direction, reverberations from
the Big Bang and the universe's creation.
A few years earlier than that, the Hubble Telescope not only discovered that distant
galaxies were moving away from ours, but the more distant the galaxy, the faster it appeared
to move away from us.
This directly contradicted the belief that physics on a galactic scale acted much the
same way as it did here on Earth.
If when the universe was first formed galaxies were thrown away from each other, gravitational
forces should have started slowly pulling them back together, but instead they were
racing apart.
Rather than shrinking, the universe was expanding.
These two discoveries became the backbone of the Big Bang theory that revolutionized
how we see the universe.
The Hubble was instrumental in making this, along with many other discoveries, and the
Institute wants the James Webb Telescope to be just as instrumental in the next great
wave of astronomical discoveries.
The final criteria the panel considered was whether the proposal really required the unique
capabilities of the James Webb Telescope to be successful.
The telescope is only expected to remain operational for 5-10 years, so time is incredibly valuable.
Given just how many people want to use it, the Institute didn’t want to allot time
to an observation that could be done with any of the other telescopes currently online.
When all was said and done, the Institute selected a total of 266 proposals, submitted
by scientists from 41 countries around the globe.
These proposals are all public, so we actually know a lot about what the James Webb Telescope
will be studying.
One of the most interesting fields is one that didn’t even exist when the telescope
was first conceived of in 1989.
An entirely new field has emerged, one that revolves around the study of planets outside
our solar system.
Since the first detection of an exoplanet was confirmed in 1992, we’ve discovered
thousands of these far-off worlds orbiting alien stars.
In 2017, astronomers shocked the world when they announced the discovery of an entire
alien solar system, consisting of seven planets all roughly the size of Earth orbiting around
a dwarf star.
And three of the seven planets, known as the TRAPPIST-1 system, sit in the star’s habitable
zone, where temperatures are thought to be just right so that liquid water can exist
on the planet’s surface.
After discovering this bounty of exoplanets, astronomers are eager to find a potential
Earth 2.0.
But exoplanets are incredibly faint, and traditional methods of detecting them — like watching
stars dim ever so slightly as planets pass in front of them — can’t tell us what
might be lurking on their surfaces.
The James Webb Telescope, however, is powerful enough that it may be able to detect light
passing directly through the atmospheres of some alien worlds and use that light to say
what kinds of chemicals are present in the atmosphere.
Perhaps, it could even detect signs of life.
It’s a capability no one really envisioned when the telescope was first being designed,
but now it’s considered one of the more exciting areas of science that the telescope
will touch upon.
The Institute allocated the next year of the telescope's life down to the hour, and the
project that got the highest number of hours was revisiting a classic.
From December 18th to 28th, 1995, the hubble telescope took 342 separate exposures of a
small region in the constellation Ursa Major.
These exposures collectively would be known as the Hubble Deep Field Image and is debatably
the most important image ever taken.
Astronomers started by pointing the Hubble Telescope toward a seemingly empty spot in
the sky.
Because the telescope was purposely directed far away from the glare produced by stars
in the Milky Way, any source of light in the resulting view had to come from galaxies.
For 10 days, Hubble collected faint light from the extremely small patch of black space.
It was a risky move.
Satellite time is hard to come by, and with all the amazing things you can see in the
night sky, for 10 days, a team of astronomers wanted to point the telescope at a seemingly
empty patch of nothingness.
But the image ended up containing thousands of never before seen galaxies, and with how
small this sliver of space was, the image gave a glimpse at how immense the universe
truly is.
And because many of these galaxies were incredibly far away, it gave scientists their first look
at galaxies when they were young.
Back to the James Webb Telescope, with a whopping 208 hours, the most of any proposal, a team
will be looking back at the Hubble's Deep Field in even higher resolution.
With the telescope's enhanced capabilities, the team will be imaging galaxies that are
even older at even greater detail, creating a portrait of an even younger universe.
For the project's first year, roughly 10,000 hours of observing time has been allocated.
If you noticed, that's actually almost 14 months worth of time, but the Institute purposefully
overprescribed the telescope's time to account for any projects falling through.
They’d rather have too much to do, then get to the end of the year and then run out
of observations to make.
About 6,000 hours were given to scientists who submitted proposals from around the world,
while almost 4,000 hours were set aside for scientists who helped design and build the
telescope and its instruments.
The Institute also set aside 460 hours for “Early Release Observations.”
Images taken in these initial hours will be the first to be made public, but as for the
very first observation the telescope will do, NASA isn’t sharing.
They want it to be a surprise.
The Institute is also planning to carve out time for targets we don’t know about yet.
These are events like supernovae, the explosive death of a star, or the merger of two particularly
dense stars that send out immense gravitational waves.
If astronomers spot a particularly noteworthy event occurring in the sky, the telescope's
operators are prepared to reorient the schedule so that they can quickly observe the aftermath
of the event.
If everything goes well with the telescope’s launch, NASA plans to conduct at least five
and a half years of science with it, and hopefully up to 10.
Ultimately, the observatory’s lifetime is dictated by its limited fuel reserves, which
are needed to help reorient the telescope in space.
Whenever that fuel runs out, the mission will end.
That finality is still quite a ways off.
First, the telescope must launch and actually survive its trip through space.
Once it reaches its final home 1 million miles from Earth, the James Webb Telescope will
undergo six months of commissioning — when scientists meticulously test out the instruments
on board — before the real science begins.
Hopefully all goes well, and the James Webb Telescope provides us plenty of science for
years to come.
If you liked this topic, checkout our videos on the largest object in the universe and
what life could look like on alien worlds, and remember, there is always more to learn.