Consider This from NPR - The Long And Winding Journey Of The James Webb Space Telescope

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of the universe that have stunned both scientists and the public. But for more than twenty years before its launch, the mission faced multiple delays, cost overruns, technical difficulties and threats from Congress to kill it altogether.We'll speak with some of the leaders of the Webb telescope mission who fought to keep it alive — and hear from astronomers whose work is now changed forever by its images.This episode also features reporting from NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

So about 40 light years away, covered in a hazy atmosphere, is a planet about six times larger than Earth. Its name is GJ 1214 b. That's Jacob Bean, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. And he and his team have been studying GJ 1214 b since 2009, trying to answer a crucial question. What is that atmosphere made of? Trust me, we've thrown the kitchen sink at this object. All the largest ground-based telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and it's given us this picture of a very cloudy world. But the fundamental composition of the atmosphere has remained elusive.

Until possibly now. Last week, the James Webb Space Telescope fixed its sights on the planet for two straight days, the longest time that the new telescope has been pointed at one single object. It is absolutely the moment of my career and one of the top moments of my whole life. It's like a birthday and Christmas and an anniversary and a graduation and Thanksgiving and Hanukkah all wrapped into one for us and happening just every day. And yet at one time, these images and the whole mission of the telescope weren't a sure thing. Prior to launch, we had 344 single point failures. A single point failure means if this one thing fails, we could potentially lose the whole mission. That's Bill Oakes, the project manager for the Webb Telescope.

He came on in 2011, and by then, NASA had been working on the telescope for more than a decade. And things were not going well. Costs got much higher than expected. The launch date had just been delayed again, and lawmakers had proposed legislation that would have killed the project altogether. It would take another decade to get the telescope off the ground. And along the way, the project saw more delays, technical setbacks, ballooning budgets, and a team of scientists and engineers who just wouldn't give up. I tell folks all the time, the type of words I never heard on this project in the 11 and a half years that I have been here is give up, failure.

Never heard those words. It was always, hey, we got an issue. How do we correct this? How do we make sure this doesn't happen again? And how do we move on? Consider this. The world's most powerful space telescope has shown us the universe as we have never seen it before. But for two decades, its fate was uncertain. We'll tell the winding story of the James Webb Space Telescope and talk to the astronomers whose work it has changed forever. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Tuesday, July 26th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally,

and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. The first sketches of what would become the James Webb Space Telescope were drawn up in the late 1990s, and not everyone was sold on it. They would giggle. I think it made them nervous. That's Peter Stockman, one of the telescope's original architects, speaking to NPR back in 2007. Nervous like this will never work. They had no faith that such a thing could be done. And they had some reasons.

For one, the telescope was big. Like, much bigger than Hubble, which at the time was NASA's premier space telescope. To me, it looks like a giant ray gun that's about to zap the dome off the Capitol building. NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce got to see a full-scale model of Webb in the early days of its construction. We're hovering over the model in front of something that looks like a golden satellite dish. The telescope's light-collecting mirror is going to look very much like this. It will be made of 18 hexagonal pieces that fit together like a honeycomb.

The sheer size of the telescope and the complexity of its technology meant that the project was under intense scrutiny. We have to constantly reassure astronomers and people who fund us that these things are being tested sufficiently on the ground that they won't go wrong. But things did go wrong. By 2005, the project was a billion dollars over budget. They had planned to launch in 2010. Now they delayed it to 2013. The team struggled to perfect the tiny, sensitive components that would let the telescope capture infrared light from deep in the universe.

So, that meant more delays. When I came on board, they had just gone through an external review. And, you know, it was basically included that they weren't going to make their current launch date, which I think at that time was 2013. That's Bill Oakes again, the project manager we heard from earlier. We didn't have enough money. So when I came on board, I was asked to go ahead and put together a replan, which was quite challenging because, you know, you're brand new onto something. The replan, that admission of this complexity is a pretty steep learning curve. So luckily, I had a wonderful team around me, the team that was already here for the most part.

And over the course of six months or so, we put together a replan that at that point showed a launch date of 2018. But that launch date also came and went. A review of the project in 2018 showed that human errors had cost the program $600 million and a year and a half of delays. So NASA brought in a ringer.

I took over just over four and a half years ago. Gregory Robinson became director of the James Webb Space Telescope program in 2018. He had been leading different missions at NASA for decades. Right after I came on, that's when we had the issue with the fasteners coming off on the sunshield cover during acoustics tests. That's when we simulate the noise vibration from the rocket as we launch. So some of the fasteners came off. We have these covers that go over the sunshield when it's folded up and they have to unfold in space so we can release it. Some of those fasteners came up. So that was a big blow that set us back about 10 months and many millions

of dollars. But Robinson says he wasn't worried. I never had a concern on the outcome. My biggest concern was, let's get on with it already, get it off the ground. Finally, in December 2021, the Webb telescope did get off the ground. All systems are go. We're inside a minute now. T-minus 50 seconds and counting. As you heard earlier... NASA ferried the telescope from California to French Guiana through the Panama Canal. And then, on Christmas Day last year, it finally launched. And liftoff. Décollage, liftoff from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.

Punching a hole through the clouds, 20 seconds into the flight, good pitch program reported. Vehicle performance is nominal. More than six months later, in early July, NASA released the telescope's first images. And now let's take a look at the very first image from this miraculous telescope. NASA Administrator Nelson, I'm going to turn this over to you. So will you please tell us about what we're seeing? Mr. President, if you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arm's length. That is the part of the universe that you're seeing, just one little speck of the universe. And what you're seeing there are galaxies that are shining around other galaxies whose light has been bent,

and you're seeing just a small little portion of the universe. The images showed portions of the universe farther away than we had ever seen, in astonishing clarity. And shortly after those first images came out, NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce spoke to astronomers about how the telescope is already revolutionizing their field. Those few stunning pictures featured at press conferences were carefully handpicked to show off what this brand new $10 billion telescope could do. But the James Webb Space Telescope also made lots of other observations since it launched in December and unfolded in space. And scientists wanted all of it.

Laura Kreidberg is an astronomer in Germany. The initial unveiling was, of course, really exciting, but it wasn't until two days later that the real work started. That was when the first data became available. Researchers pounced on that data and began to tear through everything else the telescope has seen. Jennifer Lotz is director of the International Gemini Observatory. She's part of a team looking at one particular field of galaxies. We know these galaxies pretty well, but seeing these images with James Webb, it's like putting glasses on, like things we couldn't see before now are just crystal clear. And it's been overwhelming. It's been really overwhelming. Astronomers rushed to share each new revelation with their buddies. NPR caught up with Jessica Spake of Caltech right after she got off the

phone with a friend. He'd just told her about his new analysis of the atmosphere of an exoplanet, which is a planet that orbits a faraway star. It's the most beautiful look into an exoplanet atmosphere that I've ever seen. I was in tears. I was crying down the phone. Researchers generally keep their discoveries secret until they're published, which shouldn't take long. Scientific reports have started popping up online. One of the main goals of the James Webb Space Telescope was to find extremely distant galaxies, so distant that the light from them had to travel for almost the entire history of the universe to get to the telescope. Already,

astronomers think they've spotted some. Stephen Finkelstein is an astronomer with the University of Texas at Austin. We're hoping, you know, within a few weeks we can tell the world what we found. But it does look really exciting. That was NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce. One of the astronomers she talked to was Jacob Bean from the University of Chicago. Remember the one we heard from at the beginning, who studies the planet GJ 1214b? For two full days, the telescope stared at this system, and we watched the planet orbit its star a little more than one time. We caught up with Bean after the Webb telescope captured the planet last week. So the data started arriving on Friday and we started downloading the data, but we've resisted the temptation to sort of see the planet in the data.

Meaning they have raw data, like in numbers, but they haven't turned it into an image yet. Once they do, they hope to finally see what the atmosphere of GJ 1214b is made of. But I can tell you, I am on the absolute edge of my seat about what the answer is going to be. I can't wait to see it. And I think we're going to have preliminary results in the next couple of weeks. And so that every day is a moment of new discovery. The mission of the James Webb Space Telescope is just beginning. NASA estimates it has enough fuel to last until the 2040s.

You can see the first batch of images from the telescope at npr.org. It's Consider This from Npr i'm elsa chang