Off-Nominal - 70 - Send Jupes

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Nadia Drake joins Jake and Anthony to obsess over the JWST images released this week and to talk about the telescope’s first few months of operation.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 70 - Send Jupes (with Nadia Drake) - YouTubeGet After It - YouTubeFirst Images CollectionSouthern Ring NebulaColdplay on Twitter: “Such heavenly views ✨ @NASA #JamesWebbSpaceTelescope#ColdplayBerlin 🤍”Ben Brockert on Twitter: “I’ve seen a few attempts to show the JWST images in context of the entire sky, but this one just showing how much more of the Carina Nebula there is to look at is my favorite so far. The new JWST image is in the tiny box at top right.”Follow NadiaDr. Nadia Drake (@nadiamdrake) / TwitterNadia Drake | Science JournalistFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Welcome to space. Okay, so welcome everybody. Anthony's playing some strange kind of music, and he's like, he's just itching for someone to recognize what it is, and I can't figure out, Nadia, did you, were you able to identify?

I don't know what this is, but. Oh, my gosh. I think I listened to that for about an hour on Monday. Oh, maybe you weren't watching the JWSC live stream thing? You went in on this? I missed the, Get After a fever. As I as I as I yeah yeah totally yeah okay this is why this is why I missed it I was not privy to that one I couldn't make it to that one all yeah we all listen to that for about an hour and a half so it was definitely lighting up Twitter what a jam get after it just yeah it definitely definitely has that sort of like hold music charm to it that character I'm just kind of like I'm not offensive I'm just here and I want you to know that you're here too

But every time it would pause, everybody thought the event was going to start. And then the music started again. So it was like, it wasn't a smooth loop. It was two minutes and then. Yeah, the outro loop. I mean, that's kind of like. You didn't even do the actual intro. Who are we talking to here, Jake?

No, we didn't. Well, you derailed me. But, uh, so yes, we're here today with, with Nadia Drake from, uh, where are you freelancer? Sorry, I know you write for Nat Geo a bunch of times, but what's, what's your situation. Yeah, I'm a contributing writer at National Geographic where I do a lot of stories about astronomy, planetary science, space exploration, JWST this week. So yeah, and then I occasionally write stories for other publications as well right now. Cool, cool, yeah. Well,

we've, we've had you on the list for a while because we like your coverage a lot. So, and we're trying to try to try to do the round and do like the whole space journalist landscape and get everybody on here. So we're really excited to have you today. We're going to talk about the James Webb Space Telescope. It's a big week for JWST, I guess. Is that an understatement? It's kind of a little, yeah, there's a little bit of an important week for that project. Cool, cool. Yeah. Let's do some drinks before we get into it. So who wants to go first? Anthony, I saw yours. Maybe now you have to do it first. Yeah, yeah. This is one that people have been telling me about for a little while. It's called Lalson. sip a sunshine IPA.

It's a Vermont one. I don't know. A lot of my friends have been digging these Lawson's. So I gave it a shot. You can buy them in four packs of tall boys, which is kind of great. It's a reasonable amount of beer to put in your fridge. Four? Yeah.

Four tall boys, yeah. I got that, you know, not working with the biggest fridge in the world over here. I mean, is that for like a night? I'm not saying that frequency at which you can or cannot buy a four pack. It just is a reasonable amount. No one quite if they open your fridge and they see a four-pack they're like yeah it's a reasonable amount of beer you know they don't know that you buy one every day sometimes twice a day yeah depending on the day yeah okay uh are you hitting the craft beer stores jake oh i thought you were going to alberta

no no okay no no i'm no craft beer today do you want okay i'll go then okay so i'm doing the this is the alberta special i have to have this when i'm in alberta is the drink that that everyone is very confused about. So this is a paralyzer. And so if you're in Western Canada, you'll recognize this. And it is a little bit of vodka on the bottom and Kaluwa. And then you fill it up with Coke and ice.

And then you top it with milk. And this is the part that really screws people up because they're like, why would you ever put milk and alcohol? It's just going to curdle. But if you do it right, if you pour it right over the ice cube and slowly it chills right and it won't curl just like this. which is a well done one. I did this one well. And then you get this kind of creamy, delicious coffee beverage. It's lovely. So cheers. You said Coke. Yeah. Wow.

That that threw me off. The Coke and the milk throws me off more than anything. Yeah. I say it's very weird. Everyone outside of Western Canada thinks it's bizarre and everyone inside Western Canada drinks them by the pitcher. So that's how it goes. Everyone's got their weird regional food, you know. I got scrap hole and pork roll. People are like, why would that ever exists. Those are valid questions, yes. Yeah.

They're delicious. What do you got, Nadia? You got something fancy you're looking over there. Yeah, well, so I have a backup over here because I actually spent way too much time. Oh, that's your backup in frame. That's amazing. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, I'll start with that. It would just be very off brand for me not to have a bottle of champagne. But this is off nominal. So I decided to go with a JWS Tini, which is here. It's red. I don't know if you can see, but I put a lot of gold dust in there. Oh, my Lord. That's incredible.

It's not toxic. And it's essentially, it's a... It's better than beryllium, so... Better than beryllium, yeah. It's a boulevardier with gold dust, which I think sets it apart enough to... make it a JWS teeny, but Boulevardier is, you know, equal parts,

Campari, I used the rye whiskey in here, and sweet removes. Wow. This rivals your cocktail attempts that you've had. I've been outdone today. Yes, this is incredibly. Yes.

Can you hold up your sad looking one again, Jake? Because that thing looks depressing. Look at that. It's just like you scoop some mud out of the Alberta prairie. This is just a river set. from the south Saskatchewan. That's all that is. Well, cheers.

I got to give this guy a good sick before I dump it all over everything. Yeah, you wouldn't want that. Then you'd have another JWT disaster. So, yeah. Yeah. I think it's okay to drink gold, though. Don't they put gold in, isn't Goldschlager also have gold flex in it? Isn't that okay to drink?

I had been thinking about adding that, but I had a really bad experience with Goldschlager once, so I haven't, haven't really been able to revisit it. Yeah, yeah. Goldschlager sort of takes over the drink when you put it in there. Yeah. Yeah. I think I also just have like a reflexive bad reaction to it at this point. But yes. That's how it goes. Yep. So where do we want to start? Yeah, Gold, okay to drink. Also okay to put on a telescope. Turns out. Yes. Turns out. Works out great on a telescope. Yeah. I was watching the,

the PBS documentary on it last night. It was like on cable TV and my mom has cable. So I was like, oh, I'm going to watch cable now. And then it was like on there. And they were saying that there's like five to six wedding bands worth of gold on the whole telescope. So it's actually not that much, believe it or not. I was just going to ask how many bottles of gold slager would it take to harvest

enough gold to make another JWST and apparently not that much. Yeah. Yeah, they think it's like two ounces or something. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very small amount. But anyway, that would be a fun experiment. that's a different sector of YouTube yeah thinking it through yeah all right well we'll get back to that one all right who's got a favorite pick who I got them all downloaded all these they

might break my even very powerful M1 max CPU that I have here because they are gigantic image files do we want to just look at them where are we started with this we want to do a little review of these of these images yeah okay what do you got anyone got any of anything on the deep field. You want me to zoom to a spot? Nadia, what's your favorite? Corp's galaxy? Do you like the one that's actually like this one that's the same galaxy? Did you read that blog post as well? To the upper right of that, yeah, I'm pointing to it, but you can't tell, but it's more archie. Yeah, that. You like that? You like the archie one? Which is super cool. Yeah,

and I think that's also the same galaxy. What was really... It's the same as the other two, right? It's wild. I don't know that answer. It's also these ones? I think so. Isn't the whole black hole in the middle is just lensing them all around? That's what my assumption was when I heard the very short descriptions of it. Yeah, I don't know that. I could be wrong. Yeah. I like the amoeba looking one.

So like, yeah, that's my favorite. That's my favorite one in the whole thing right there. Look at that glorpi guy. Because it retains enough detail. It retains enough detail so you still know that it's a galaxy. It's not just a little like stretched piece of light. You can see the dust bands in there. Yeah, that's great one.

Yeah. This is a wild witch show. If you go to the upper right, there's a really bright red one. Yeah, that guy. And I don't know if you saw some of the sliders that had a comparison with the Hubble image where there was a slider where you could go back and forth and look at what Hubble had showed. And then this one, that galaxy pops out of nowhere in the JWS team. It's like not even. It's not even there in Huffles.

Is it? Yeah, I think it's this guy right here. Yeah. Oh, wow. No, I think it's... No, this is different. Well, that one also does a good job. That one, too.

Yeah, but the bright one in the upper right corner. And I saw a funny tweet go by about how we should be feeling bad for Hubble because it's being used like the before picture. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, Hubble is now like your old iPhone when you're just like, damn, that camera sucked. You're like, now I got to get the new iPhone. Yeah. Yeah.

Which one's Joe Biden's favorite? That's what I wanted to know. Oh, boy. Can we even know? Is there any way to know based on that? I need you guys to fill me in on this event because I just did not catch it. I heard it was short, but like what? Which one would like?

Well, they only showed the deep field. But I bet if you asked him, he would say he loves them all equally like his children. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So on Monday. That's a comedic minefield. there, Nadia, so I'm just laying off.

I'm laying off. Just throwing that one out there. Yeah, so on Monday, because you missed it, there was a big reveal at the White House of that deep field image. And it was initially scheduled for 5 p.m. And then we were told it was going to be 5.30. And then I think it started, when did it start?

It was after 6.06 or something. Yeah. Okay. It was later than an Elon event. Yeah, exactly. And so everybody was bopping to that on hold music for, you know, an hour and change. And then the event lasted something like 11 minutes. And they presented the image, but there was no discussion of the science content.

So it was kind of, and it ended very abruptly. It ended abruptly and with the comment. I think now is a good time for the media to leave. Yeah. The comment that it ended on. There was nothing else beyond that. They were just shuffled everyone out of the room and apparently kept going. Yeah.

It was very odd. And I felt bad. I felt like it was a missed opportunity to get some really cool science on a very, very big stage and talk about what's actually in that image. You know, the lensing effects, how that works, the galaxies that Hubble can't see. And then on Tuesday, they presented the fact that there's actually, they have a spectrum from one of the old, old, old galaxies in there. And so you can tell how much oxygen is in that particular galaxy.

And it just felt like there was so much more that could have been done on Monday. And I don't know what happened. I don't know. Do you want a little bit of content from this, Jake? I have one clip from this press conference. Okay, yeah, if you have a good clip, I'll take a look at it. Just to maybe you could review the accuracy of this clip for us. So let me just.

Okay, play it. Play, let's see it. Let's have a look. Is that how you pronounce his name? No, it's not. Do you need that again, Jake? I don't know. Maybe you need a little louder this time. Do you need that a little louder? Yeah.

Yeah. He tried. That's like a level one pronunciation right there, man. That is really good. Oh, my God. Yeah. The unfortunate part about that is you couldn't see Dr. Z's reaction because he was just a tiny box on the screen.

and couldn't tell if he was really enjoying that or not. But yeah, it was a contentless press conference. I mean, so my interpretation to this was like it was very last minute because the other, like the main presentation on Tuesday morning had the deep field part of their presentation. So like you can tell that that was already in the works like they were going to present all five and they had it all lined up in a row. And so this felt like very much like a gloved on like, oh, it's working the

telescopes good let's get some let's let's let's you know do our victory lap with this right so yeah cynically we talk about that a lot some someone in the white house that went does that smell like a cheap win yeah I need one of those yeah but I mean I guess it's good though because that afterwards I guess they hung around and had like I had like you know science talk with the president so I guess that's a win right for sure and especially like if you want to go in on Nelson being the the political administrator, right? Like, these are the kind of things where it's good to put them in a room and do the politicking while you have the goodwill of this ridiculously amazing image for a project

that was not without political strife for so long. Like, that's a pretty happy ending to that. Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. Someday I would love to know, you know, the backstory of what actually happened. I think yeah there's probably some good stuff in there. Just how that came together, right?

Yeah. Someone will write a good juicy book about it eventually. Yeah. I would like to talk about this image a little bit more for a second because I feel like I didn't get a great, there was so much talk about all the different images and all that. So maybe I just missed where this detail was. But Nadia, maybe you know,

since you were in and around the team so much of how this spot was chosen as the first deep field? Do you have any idea? Because it's a particularly interesting one in terms of like the gravitational lensing that's happening here, which gives it this crazy like, I don't know,

Salvador Dali kind of vibe to it. Yeah, I think the lensing actually looks like someone like poked a finger into it and did a little swirl. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it's a pool of water filled with Sprangley stuff, it's kind of like this cocktail. Yeah. I actually don't know how they picked that particular deep field. I know in general with the the image selection criteria that they were using, they had more than somewhere around 70 possibilities. And the targets were selected for aesthetic appeal political reasons as well. I think they were looking for spots that had been imaged before. So you could do a little bit of compare contrast and obviously get some science out of it as well. And then. once the telescope was actually able to start making observations,

it was just a question of which of those objects were actually visible during the period that it would be making those observations. And then which of those 70 or so targets were not going to be part of the first year of science observations. So they didn't scoop any of the teams that had actually competed for time on the telescope. Oh, that's interesting balance too. Yeah, that's actually a difficult needle to thread now that you think about it, right? Because I read there was like this New York Times, I think, piece that I read this morning that had a little bit of behind the scenes on that.

And so you're right. It was like 70 targets. But they picked them back in like 2016 or something. They had the candidate list. But because of where the telescope is out at L, I can't remember all the L points, but you know, it's like past the moon. Okay. L2. So at any given time, because of the sun shield, only half the universe is visible to it, depending

on how you're and you can you can yaw in different ways to get all of it but but the the one half hemisphere is visible to you so depending on when it actually flies you have to down select based on what's you know because if it was six months later can't point straight out it's still got a I forget what the maximum tip angle is but it has to keep the mirror behind the sunshield right so it's like a little bit of the direct out that's missing as well yeah yeah so yeah I guess you have to if it was six months later they wouldn't have been able to pick these six right they would have been like or these five would have been a whole different set Yeah, it would have been looking at a different part of the sky.

Yeah. Huh. Yeah, it was funny because all of the targets that they ended up showing are actually in the southern sky, which I like to say is where all the really good stuff is anyway. It's like, I love our northern sky. Don't get me wrong. But all of the really cool stuff is in the southern sky. So I thought that was funny too.

But they will obviously be looking in the northern hemisphere as well. Yeah, yeah. I found these slider images, Nadia, for your favorite gal. galaxy because this is wild i don't think i looked this closely at this but so we're looking at hubble here and then yeah there's that little red galaxy and literally out of nowhere it's gone man wow yeah yeah it's like out of nowhere yeah yeah they've really yeah we still love you hubble yeah just not as good anymore with the new new features that are out there people are asking in the chat tell somebody ask if the reason it's that red is like that how red shifted it is and it was just

completely gone from Hubble's view right yeah not shooting in the same uh spectrum well that would make sense yeah yeah i would assume that is true yeah it's it's bonkers yeah yeah that is like such a like a mind like melter for me because like so the telescope is infrared so like all the light it picks up is light you can't see and then they they do like the crazy color shifting things so they say okay the lowest like the lowest frequency that we can see in the infrared becomes uh you know violet or blue or whatever and then the highest frequency becomes red and so they they just like map it over visible spectrum so you can actually see something um and like that that's crazy to me because then there's like this whole that article was talking about there's like a now there's like a color palette

It's like an astrophysics color palette. It's like what you do when you map infrared over visible. And it's like that's, so it's like this way that we think about what color of the universe is, but it's not exactly true. It's just sort of the interpretation of our telescopes. And I don't know, I like, I lay awake at night thinking about that. Yeah, one of the scientists said at the press briefing that followed the unveiling of the images on Tuesday that if you had,

infrared eyes, this is what the sky would look like to you, because the colors are just corresponding to the wavelengths of infrared light. And then someone else made the crack, well, yeah, but you'd have to have six and a half meter big infrared eyes. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. This one, the ring nebula was my, maybe not my favorite because Karina Nebula is tough to beat. But this one is, I don't know, spectacularly. sci-fi. And the thing that you were saying about how it doesn't map to like what we can see

always sort of depresses me on these images because I could never drive a spaceship to this spot and look at this. Like I always I always wondered that of like how far would I have to go to get this view on a thing? I want people to do the math on that that aren't me because I couldn't do that math but like where would I need to be to see this kind of image. For for that like frame of reference to look out the window and see that for your eye. Yeah, I just want to know, you know. But that one's, this one's, this one's wild. Let me zoom in on this sucker. That's what I got on my phone.

All my computer blows apart, but. That's the one I picked. That's the good, that's good, that's good, that's good, that's cool. Well, all the detail of those dust clouds are. Yeah. It's so good. It's like, because you know, Hubble sees the same thing. Sorry, Hubble.

We still love you. And it looks like a smooth, you know, surface, but then when Web's look, JWST is looking at it, it's like it all just gets crumbly. Like you have this crumbly. It turned up the definition slider and light rooms to like get all that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's it just also looks like something you could dive into. Right. Yeah. Because that's like, so this is like this is a story that happens a lot in space because I'm remembering now this happened to us on Mars pretty recently. Right. So we had in Gail Crater, there's like that ridge called Vera Rubin Ridge. And they from orbit, they saw a whole bunch of iron from it, right?

So like just glowed in the spectrum of iron. Like there's iron everywhere in this thing. And then they went there with the rover and they like drilled and they're like, there's not really any iron here. What's going on? And it just happened that there were like really high concentrations of iron in like little spots all over. But the resolution of the orbiter was so low it was averaging it all out into one big

mushy iron pancake, you know. And so this is kind of reminded me of that. It's just like Hubble saw these beautiful around cloudy things. And then at JW, you look a little closer and said, no, these are really sharp and rigid. And, you know, your resolution was just averaging them out. That's like, I don't know, it's such a good like analog for how all space science works. Like we just, we learn something. We make an assumption, but it's all based on the data.

And the more you get the more of those change, right? It's wild to me. I love that about space science. Yeah, I think that's why it's important to. you know, do the ground-truthing, especially of data from orbit, which is what you were just talking about with Mars, is, you know, we can make a lot of assumptions about what we see from orbit, but then once you put, there's really no substitute for having a rover on the ground. You learn surprising things. Yeah, we have to get Anthony's spaceship here. Yeah.

I need the drive to see this view. That's all. You know, I would like to drive there. When they put that one up on Tuesday, because I was. at Goddard Space Flight Center in the big room, very big crowded room full of BIPs and scientists and reporters and NASA Social. And the cheerleaders were there at the beginning. Yeah, we need to talk about that. I was like, it is too early and I'm not caffeinated enough and this just needs to stop.

But this image got a lot of a very audible crowd reaction because you can see the two stars in the middle, right? They'd known it was a binary star, but couldn't see that second star, except in this view. And so you can see that second star. And then, you know, there's that galaxy, the edge on galaxy that's up in the upper left corner. And I think there's actually a spiral galaxy below it, too. But the edge on galaxy caught a lot of attention as well. Well, this one, it's weird. So the mirrory images are a little bit lower-res than when they do the full...

near images. So if I load up every pixel, I think this is the one you're talking about here. Oh, there's two actually. There's one here. Yeah. And one here. Yeah. Yep. And then they're all done one of Yeah. It's just when I was making bets about what the images were going to be of, what the targets were. I was like, it's going to be a deep field. And one of my astronomer friends said, well, you know, every single one of these is going to be a deep field. So you win. because even in the particular object, it's like the telescope is so sharp that you get

all of the galaxies in the background too. Yeah. There is the depth of field to these images. It's not like you can just just focus in on 300 light years away. You're going to get the whole thing. That's one aspect we should talk about too, the difference in

the exposure times essentially for all these images compared to the Hubble images that we're comparing to where the Hubble Deep field was 10 days. I think, and these were like a couple hours or something. 12 hours, I think I read. That's got crazy implications, not only for what the telescope can do, but like, how much more it can do with a particular image in terms of exposing an image for the

same amount of time that Hubble does, but how much more it can do because it doesn't need to expose for that much longer, right? It can fit more observations into a similar time. So, um... Yeah, productivity, right? I don't know, Nadia talked to anyone about the upcoming observations and, like, productivity of like how quickly do they switch between targets, you know? Do you apply for a certain amount of time, observation time, and a particular target? And what's like the general range of that?

Yeah. Yeah. So that's what happens. When people submit proposals, they have a particular amount of observing time that they want, and then the committee gets to decide how much observing time they actually get. And so if you look at all, actually all of the first year of observations are available online. Proposals are online. You can read them. There's a layperson summary too for, I think, all of them. But they, and you can sort them by the amount of telescope observing time that they get.

And so some of them are, you know, I think the biggest one is more than 100 hours. And then all the way down to, you know, a very short observation. So yeah, and the order in which they're being done is a mystery. at least as far as I know. We don't have that information yet, but we'll find out. I'm not a patient person. I hate waiting and so I'm like, just be patient and wait. I mean, they're also probably still figuring it out, right?

Like Jake was saying about how every couple of months when the launch window would change, that's going to change what they could get done at the beginning because you're going to be in a different spot of space. So I imagine balancing, okay, I know that targets on our observation list, but we're going to lose these other three in the next three weeks. So let's do those first and get to you when we can. Like that is, I don't envy the scheduling there. I mean, theoretically, you should have like, have a list of a whole year, like, in order.

And then as you pass it, you just move it to the bottom of the list, right? And then you just start whatever you get because it's going to be in the same order every time because you're always just going around the earth around the sun at the same thing. Right. So, hmm. I guess that's fairly predictable. Yeah. Universe is not going to be like fast. Space operations is just like it's such a fun problem.

Like I don't know. It's like really interesting. These weird, weird variables that just get thrown into your, your plan just based on bizarre orbital mechanics and things like that. My favorite one in that sphere was the fact that the moon was going to get in the way during the launch window that opened up in late December. And so there was like a week in January when they couldn't launch the telescope because the moon would be in the wrong place. They would hit the moon all the way by. It wasn't going to hit the moon. I think they're good enough of avoidance for that.

But yeah, that we know of. But the moon's gravity would have perturbed it enough so that they would have had to spend more fuel than they wanted to getting it back onto trajectory. So that was just like a big no-go, which I kind of loved. I thought that was a very interesting fun fact. And plus then you wouldn't be able to brag about all the lifetime they gave it, right? All the extra lifetime. The most perfect launch ever apparently. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've never done a better job than this. Yeah. Well, okay, but they did start talking about how they have 20 years of fuel on this thing, right? So what do we make at that timeline? Does that seem like what you were expecting? Is that more than you thought they would end up with? How did that come in for you? nobody has opinions on it.

We lost her, I think. She might be gone. Yeah, she was so unimpressed with that question. It defied all of my expectations. Yeah, to fight all. Yeah, no, I thought that was really funny. I mean, the way they bragged about it was like so over the top. But I guess you take your wins when you can, right?

I think she's going on. Yeah. I don't know about the 20 years, though. I feel like it's like tempting fate a little bit. Like saying it's going to wrong with this. Putting it right out. Yeah. Just,

you know, maybe they should say like we gave it. Maybe you should talk about how much margin you gave it rather than, but then a person can't interpret that right, a lay person. So do you think that means there's more than 20 years? Is that what you're saying? Maybe.

I don't know. Like I kind of, I don't think they were, they're going to lie. They're just giving you the best case scenario. that I don't know, because you're going to balance it with, if something goes wrong, then all you just sound like an idiot, right? Yeah, or this early on if you don't know, like, exactly what certain observations are

going to cost you in terms of, of, I think we have not yet back. Are you back? Hello. I'm back. I'm sorry. Our power just, it went out because there is actually a down for happening outside. So, yeah, fingers crossed that I stay on. I want to get this light back on.

Oh, God, that's so bright. I'm in my face. Yeah, yeah, we're getting flashpast. NASA's live streaming, yeah. Yeah, you're the Canadian Space Agency. That's, that's your role. We saw you once and you never came back. No one even mentioned you ever again.

Yeah. Your internet was being piped through Rogers' telecom. Wait, so they were the one that did the spectroscopy, right? Was that the one they were kicking to Canada for? It was the exoplanet, yeah. The Exoplanet. Yeah, the Exoplanet one. All right.

I do have that. I do have it, but I just have some general, well, number one, I'm not the expert in any of the things we're about to talk about today. But I feel like they were really hyping up. We've got some images of an exoplanet, right? And everyone, and I'm like not the layman when it comes to listening to these live streams. But I feel like when they put up a graph, everyone that was watching was like, oh. it's not like a picture it's not a picture of a planet

I was waiting to see a picture of the planet so I felt like it was weird that they made this one second and it was weird the way that they introed it but you two probably know a lot more about why this graph is extremely cool so please help enlighten me the disappointed layman well I think they made it pretty clear that it was going to be a spectrum

of an exoplanet beforehand But maybe it's just not entirely clear what that means. You know, how is the spectrum different from an image? Although when this one was shown in the room, people were really psyched about it too. And I think it's because it demonstrates that the telescope is capable of making this kind of observation. And exoplanets are a huge focus of observations, at least in the first year, which is also interesting because when the telescope was designed, exoplanets were not one of its primary. targets and now it's become a field that's actually commanding a fair proportion of the telescopes observing time and so proving that it could make this measurement I think is a really important thing

do you know why that was like why did they not think about exoplanets at the time they designed was it was just because we didn't have that many like because that was before it was the 90s man yeah yeah it's like the field wasn't that mature yet um you know the first planet found orbiting a sunlight star was found in 1995. And then a couple years earlier, there were planets found around a pulsar, which everybody forgets, but shouldn't. And now I feel like if you look at the number of exoplanets that have been discovered per year, it's an exponential curve.

And so it's only really been in the last decade that we've had these like handfuls of planets just like falling out of the sky. So now I think, you know, the field is quite mature. and people are starting to be able to ask the questions that they want to ask about the types of planets that we can observe with this telescope. So I think that was part of it. So how does this level of accuracy and sensitivity for this kind of observation, like, then what? What do we get out of that? What else are we going to learn about exoplanets that we're we can't right now with the conjectures we can make?

So this particular observation, I was kind of like, cool, so we know there's water vapor in this atmosphere. It's steamy. It's a type of planet that we don't have in our own solar system, which is always interesting. Look at worlds that are totally alien that we don't see close to home. But I think what people are really excited about with this telescope is looking at the smaller planets, the terrestrial worlds that could be Earth-like in many ways. And seeing what we can tease out of their atmospheres, what kinds of molecules are in there. I would say in the year leading up to launch, there was a lot of hype about the telescope's ability to maybe find biosignatures or signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres. And I think that's a little bit overhyped because that kind of measurement takes a very long time and it's tricky. And the scientists I spoke with were like, yeah, like maybe, but what's actually going to be really cool is that we can take a census of exoplanet atmospheres and learn more about what's in them in general. And I think that's still valuable. Yeah, that's the first thing that came to mind for me. Because like if your telescope's limited to your own solar system, it's like, okay, we have like, you know, this couple dozen like large bodies that we can look at and get some spectrum. But like they're all pretty different.

And, you know, if you if you check out Neptune's, you know, atmospheric contents, you can't make a lot of derivations about what's going on on mercury with that. You know, like they're tough to do that way. But now we can turn this to all 4,000 of those capler targets and get. get some like good bulk data on what's happening right and kepler targets yeah but test is up there just putting in some work too so yeah yeah all those kind of things right so yeah it's it's the volume yeah we have to throw it love to test too yeah we have to love test we have to love Hubble we have to love everybody in the sky right now even though this telescope is working we're all one big telescope family yeah yeah

Okay. Yeah. Hmm. I finally got the Karena nebula image to load if you wanted to see. Okay. I literally clicked on it like minutes ago in preview here and it finally came up because. Did you have like the 20,000 pixel one loaded there? It's enormous.

Yeah. It should look what's the exact size. It is 14,000 pixels across 300 pixels per inch. So there you go. But yeah. Good thing we're broadcasting this is an AP. Hey man. I could downres this to 720 if you want to do your best NASA for sure.

NASA, NASA. So this image is absolutely gorgeous in every way. Yeah. And I would also like to pull up this contextual tweet that I saw from Ben Brockert earlier, who posted the image of the nebula and then its context in the whole thing. Yeah. It's like, what? Yeah.

Yeah. To see how little of the entire nebula we're seeing is awesome. Wow. It's like, please, please get on that stitching of the entire panorama. Well, and isn't like the main one, isn't that already like 10 light years across or something?

Like, it's pretty big, isn't it? I think it's even, oh, the one that we're looking at, you mean? No,

no, the actual Karina one. I thought they were saying something like, you know, like they're talking about them like their peaks, their mountains, whatever they were like, oh yeah,

those are like seven or, yeah, totally. So the whole thing is, it's like unimaginably. But yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, look at that. Like, the image I just pulled up is 14,000 pixels.

This thing, like, there aren't enough pixels for this. That's the wild thing about nebulous for me is that like they're, they're so vast that if you were in them, you wouldn't see them, right? Like, they're so spread out that you can only see them from this far away. It's like the forest for the trees kind of situation, but for nebulous, right? Yeah. It's like Olympus Mons on Mars. like you would never notice it because it's so big.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Can't see the nebula for the gap. Keep trying. Yeah. I love, I love that nebula picture is just, yeah, it's so cool. I think that was my favorite. Yeah, that's really beautiful.

All right, I've got a, I've got a prompt for us. Think of your favorite Hubble images. When were those captured and released? like right off the bat or were they you know years into Hubble's operations like I'm trying to just give us some context here that these images were like immediately catapulted into pop culture cold play had them in their concert that night or whatever I think I have that tweet somewhere yeah like they were immediately pop culture right but yeah the Hubble images like oh that's allowed I don't know if anyone else can hear that but me, but it was loud cold play.

Content ID all over the place on this. I guess my point is like, the best images are definitely not these images, which is even more exciting that these are great images and the best ones are like, we have, we don't even thought of yet. Yeah. It's also interesting because like, so they, you know, these get released today in 2022. and we have all this like social media power to distribute them very quickly, very far. And Hubble didn't have that, right? Like when when they dropped the hot new astrophysics picture in 1996 or something,

like, took a couple of scholastic printing cycles before like. Yeah, yeah. It was on everyone's textbook. Maybe CBS showed it, but then it was just on your screen and it was gone and you couldn't do anything with it, right?

Couldn't look it up again. Yeah. I wonder if like more of the JWST ones will. become like those iconic images or will it just be like so much data that we'll just like I can't do it anymore also badly makes a great point Hubble sucked when we launched it I've kind of forgot about the fact that we blew it on that one so broken so broken yeah so bad yeah yeah yeah so everyone likes to grunsfeld and the Hubble huggers yeah yeah yeah it's like people like to complain about how much JWST cost, but Hubble with all of the repair missions was like

not that different. Yeah. A couple shot of flight here and there. Yeah. They did four, I think, right? Four shuttle flights, right? Five. I think five, right?

Five if you count. There are five repairs? Because they launched on one too, right? I guess. Oh, yeah. I'll have to do the math again. But I mean, right there, you're up into like, you're up to like JWST baseline cost estimates, you know? on just shuttle flights alone.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not insignificant. Yeah. It's, I mean, thank goodness JWST worked because it's not like we can send anyone out there to fix it.

Right? See, this is back to my main thesis, though. I think we talked about this, Jake, on the show right after it launched with, we had Jeff Faust on and I brought up this and he had no reaction to this. So Nadia, maybe you will. I was, like, let me salvage a good situation from a bad situation thought on JWST not working was there has never been a greater prompt for the human space flight program to rise to a challenge

that our $10 billion telescope doesn't work and we'd need a human to go save it. It would have been like the greatest, you know, writing prompt for the human spaceflight program of all time. We would have, it would solve Jake's main problem of why, why are we doing anything, flying humans into space. Got a great why for you. It would have been like, we did. We'd have been like, we definitely would have done it. I'm going to go to my grave saying this. We definitely would have fixed JWST if it was broken. Hmm. I wonder if I agree that we definitely would have fixed it. You think we would have just let it eventually sail off into Helios space and just like, you know, let it go free. I'd be like, man. I could totally see this being like the opening

couple of scenes of a sci-fi movie where it's like something big is coming and we kind of know what it is, but we need a very sharp telescope to see it, and JWST is out there, but it's broken, and so everybody gets together and figures out how to send humans there in like two months or something super unrealistic. I could

totally see that being like a fiction plot. If anyone's watching in Hollywood, us three are available. We can clear some schedules off. We can make this happen. No problem. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting to think about. Even now, when it first launched, there were discussions about making it serviceable with the somewhat surprising statement that servicing the observatory was going to be a priority. And now that we know it has 20 years of gas in the tank, I kind of wonder, because of that lifetime, is servicing still going to be a priority? Because it's already got, you know, two decades, assuming it doesn't just get pummeled by micrometeorites, as we've seen. in the last couple of weeks. So, yeah.

Yikes. Yeah, that one got my heart a little bit when I read that. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of servicing, like, like, I don't, I feel like I don't know enough exactly about what people meant by that, right? Because a lot of people are just like, let's put a grappling hook or a docking port or something on it.

Thinking in like a curvil space program, like pick a part out and click it on there, right? but Hubble had like the removable instrument palettes that they could replace things with so yeah and that helped it Hubble's very old it got upgraded with different instruments through time that kept it relevant and it still looks like crap compared to the web photos right so unless you're able to go up and replace like the instrument package is refueling even worth it at 20 years knowing that in 20 years we'll have 20 years better optics and better sensors and better instrumentation. Yeah, it's a valid question. I mean, what they were talking about with servicing was just refueling as far as I know.

Because it wasn't a conversation that was had very publicly, and it's hard to find documentation. I know because I and a number of other reporters have tried to find documents about what that actually means. So my guess, an educated guess, but still a guess, is that it is just looking at, refueling. And then, I mean, I hope, well, that's too optimistic. I was going to say, I hope at that point that we'll have like the next, next, you know, great observatory that's working and already in space, but that's going to be another. Oh, yeah. Who's in the hot seat now? W-first, Roman? Like, who's going to catch all the shit from Astro Twitter at this point? Yeah. Still Elon.

And it's Roman. Yeah. Yeah. So I think Roman is up next. And then, you know, whatever great observatory, it comes out of the Astro 2020 Decadal Survey, which they left kind of vague. But I think they were looking at a timeline of like the 2040s or 50s for launching that. And I just thought like, I'm not going to be doing this job anymore. Like I'm older than Hubble.

Hubble was really old. I'm older than Hubble. Like hopefully I'm retired at that point. I mean, I would love to continue to be covering this, but that's like, that's, that's a while in the future. Yeah, this doesn't happen every day. Yeah. I don't know. I think if you could refuel it, even if you didn't have the instruments upgraded, I think it's still be worth it.

Because like, let's say you could refuel it for like, I don't know, $200 million. Like, you know, just some sort of robotic fuel tank that goes up there, grapples it, sticks a thing in. We're getting good at that. Now we're working on that, right? It's almost like the company that built this thing has an entire company devoted to attaching other satellite buses to other satellites. Imagine that. So, I mean, if you ask me, like, you know, if you could, if you could spend $200 million to zoom down to the surf, maybe this is a 200 million is a wrong number. But if you could spend, you know, 5% of Opportunity Rover's budget to get it back online for another 10 years, of course I do it.

even if the cameras are terrible compared to perseverance, right? So, like, if you could spend like five, 10 million bucks to get opportunity rolling again, no? Nadia says no, she's not interested in that. No. No, my favorite stick to get on is that Mars is a super boring planet and we should just like go some more interesting. I thought you were going to be like, no, opportunity sucks. Spirit was great. Revised Spirit.

Yeah. Pick your favorite one. Spirit's just stuck there in pretty new conditions. you know? Pick your favorite. If you could spend $100 million to get Cassini back for 10 years. Yeah, yeah. Go salvage it out of the Saturn atmosphere.

Like, of course you would, right? So it's like it's such a good return, even if you cannot upgrade the instruments. But yeah, anyway. I would do that. I would do that with Cassini. Yeah. Yeah. Mars, no.

All right. Well, we'll have a Mars discussion later, Nadia, when when we're not. on the air and I can get a little more angry about it. But I'm, uh, I have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, so okay, I have another, I'm, I'm thinking more about this now. So talking about servicing it because I'm, I'm making some parallels because so the first thing I'm having, bear with me. I'm like having realizations on air right now. But so Hubble was serviceable and not just like with a mounting point like you said, Anthony. You could, it had like human removal. You could literally just like slide these things out and hot swam things.

Yeah. So like it was designed from the beginning to be serviceable by people. And now I'm also remembering that Hubble was like a a leftover spy satellite, right? It's like one of those KH 11. It was it had economies of scale to it. Yes. Yeah.

So so. I'm just want to make it clear because it was it was contracted different than it was originally supposed to be a three meter mirror. And then a couple years down the line, they were like, what do you think about a 2.4 meter mirror? Because it would be a little cheaper because we have the ability to produce them at a higher rate than you would expect. Was there not actual leftover parts, though, as well? Because I know that's true, but it wasn't there also like Roman, was a was an NRO mirror that they had. And there's like, I think a handshake agreement that they will never point it at Earth.

Gotcha. So carrying on, though, so that's fine. But isn't there also now, we're still early in JWT's life, but isn't it also got a same kind of like top secret military lineage because it's made by Northrop Grumman. And, you know, like this whole foldable telescope thing is, it seems like way crazier than it actually ended up being executed. It's almost like maybe they've done this before or something like that, right? Like, you know, this went pretty smoothly considering there was all these.

The segmented mirror that they've aligned to like microscopic precision. Yeah. So isn't there like some, maybe you know this better than I do, but wasn't there already a connection with the military for JWST as well? Wasn't some of this tech? I think it's suspected. We won't know because it's all going to be.

We'll never know. Well, the back of the mirrors were classified. So they wouldn't classify that unless there was. And I wonder, Nadia, if this is why you can't get answers about some of the documentation because it's all still relevant. Right? Yeah. And then I'm wondering, is this thing out?

actually serviceable in that they already know how to do it and it's all built in right oh it's like somebody called them and we're like you should put a you should put a grappling hook on that thing man like and north up's like it's all good it's all good we got it don't worry about it I have I have no information on any of that I feel like I missed an entire chapter in the JWST book that I should have read for homework I don't I think I only know the like you can't take a picture of the back of the mirrors thing, but everything beyond that is suspected. I mean, I feel like the deployment was so tense that it, they obviously haven't done anything of that scale before.

I'm saying obviously, but, you know, probably. And it was just such an audacious attempt at, you know, building a giant telescope in space to say, we're going to do this thing. It has 344 single points of failure. after launch, after it rides a controlled bomb into space, and then there's still 344 ways that this thing could fail, you know, just with one thing going wrong. It's like, I don't know.

I, it didn't, it just, it didn't come across to me as the kind of thing that they'd done before, at least not on that scale. Interesting. But I don't, I don't have any insider information or really any information, it turns out at all. So. Yeah, yeah. I'm just wearing a tinfoil hat when I say that so you can throw it out. so you can throw it out there and throw it up.

But Northern Grum is my tinful hat force nowadays. They got a lot of good ones, man. You know? Maybe Zuma was a subscale JDAVJWST. Zuma was the tech demonstrator. So, yeah. The deployer was actually one of the 344 things that they were trying to get some flight heritage on. Yeah.

They fixed it in time for the launch. Oh, boy. Jake, this whole week did validate your... thesis on SLS, I would like to say, just to tie this in a nice knot. Your thesis is, if SLS was flying a lot, no one would care how much it costs. I haven't heard a damn thing about how much JWST costs. Nothing. Nobody cares about the fasteners that they shook loose during that one vibration test

or the time that the vacuum chamber leaked because it rained a lot in Texas. Nobody cared about any of that this week at all. Yeah, yeah. In retail sales, there's an expression that's revenue hides all sins, right? So you can run a crappy business. If people are buying stuff, then nobody cares. Like, nobody cares how bad you are. That's kind of how I'm saying.

Yeah. It's also, yeah, nobody cares about the clamp that almost dropped the telescope. Oh, yeah. That's right. We were like, did you drop it? Like, the release was so vague. Everybody was like, oh, we dropped it, but not a lot. Like it's not a lot.

We didn't drop it a lot. We kind of caught it. We put our foot under it and like hit that hard. It was there. I was on the carpet. It was okay. There's a gentle bump. It was fine.

It was within the margin of how much Arian shakes. So it was okay. Yeah. That was a little rough. Yeah. Okay. Well, this is interesting. This is,

I don't know, this is a cool, this is cool telescope. I'm really excited that this is operational now. Like, Nadia, is there anything, anything we're missing in terms of this release that, any good stories you wanted to tell you? I mean, you were there covering and stuff, but anything we're missing in terms of good stuff we should be talking about here. Well, I think we missed the last picture. Oh, we did.

We missed a picture. I don't know if you've got that. I got it. Oh, I got it. Oh, I got it. Yeah. Stan's quintet. Yeah.

I mean, this one was super cool. It was actually, I guess my story is it was really fun being at Goddard for the release. It was definitely a circus. In general, it's not my favorite way to cover news is to be smack in the middle of a circus, but it felt like the right place to be. In the middle of the cheerleaders. Oh, yeah. Tell us about the cheerleaders.

Give us some first person's perspective on these. No comment. No comment. Great perspective. We, they had the press come in early, and so we did not have to walk through the gauntlet of cheerleaders, but at some point it became obvious that there was a lot of noise

coming from outside the auditorium. And I was just breathing deeply. It was an interesting phenomenon. I always feel like, you know, there have been some celebration, of spacecraft achievement, you know, even fairly recently where there's like a weird demonstration of patriotism or something with a lot of American flag waving. I'm really glad they didn't do that here. They couldn't because it's an international mission. But I always feel like there's some kind of bizarre little, you know, cheering squad that shows up. It's kind of cute, but I don't really know what to make of it. They were loud. I'm like, I'm trying to be very diplomatic here.

Strong stance, gold pom-poms. They were loud and very, very genuinely excited about what they were doing. So, yay. Good for them. They're living their best life. Their best cheerleading life. I am curious to see what like the rollout of imagery and data is from here forward. We don't have any idea what that's going to be like yet.

So, no. Did we get our Jupiter pick today? That's what I'm mad about. I did see a Jupiter pick. But it wasn't a good one. There was like a. Yeah, there was one that came out early, right? It was like from the paper.

But yeah, this one. But I thought there was going to be like a nicer. So we'd heard they were not going to be really so. I, you know, don't hate on Jupiter. Not everybody can look beautiful all the time. But we'd heard that were not going to be Mars. Canceled. Canceled.

That's it. Power is going out again. No, they said there wasn't going to be a processed jubiter release today. I don't actually know what the cadence of releasing additional imagery is that has been processed. I asked that question and did not get an answer. So, well, the answer I got was we need a little bit of time between people need a break between this first image jump and the next. And I'm personally like, I don't, I don't need a break. I want to see what else you have.

I know, I know there are more. more, yeah. I know there are more images in the pipeline that have already been processed because you've talked to me about them without telling me what they are or what they look like, except that they're amazing. So, you know, don't keep you waiting. But that's just me. Well, if the project managers are watching, get it together.

We want to see our juper picks. Nadia, while you're waiting for more imagery, what else? are you working on if people do not partake in the Nadia universe? What are they missing? Ooh, what else am I working on? We're spinning up a story about SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in a context that's kind of new and maybe surprising. So I'm psyched about that.

Mulling over a story about how to discover life as we don't know it, which is one of the questions that kind of keeps me up at night. That's something that's like, generally in your lineage or question in the family? Vaguely in the lineage, yes. Yeah. So looking for life beyond earth, I think is kind of where my brain is now. And thank goodness, because it's a fun, it's a fun place to be.

And they can check out your dog on Twitter. Oh my gosh, yes. I thought she was going to be right here. Yeah, my Twitter account needs to be a lot more professional than it is. Mostly just like dogs and champagne. relevant to our interests. So, we like it. Yeah.

Cool. Good. Well, I'm glad. Yeah. Well, I guess that's the show. I guess we're at an hour. This went really quickly. We got wrapped up in galaxy picks.

So we got galaxy brain now. Yeah. Galaxy brain. Yeah. It's not as bad as it sounds. Oh, man. condition is it treatable. Anthony, what are you working on this week?

Boy, I don't know yet. I don't know. Yeah, I'll see. We'll see what happens. I don't know what's going on yet. There's like some, the whole Russia situation is really weird still. The rabble rousing of Rago goes in as we're still trying to like trade seats and I'm like, why are we still doing that? It doesn't seem that important.

I don't know. Maybe something with that. Yeah, it's just super weird. Maybe a little bit about the Artemis Accords in our new favorite signatory. Yeah, a real humdinger coming in hot off the press that Saudi Arabia has signed on. That's a situation too. Yeah, that'll probably make it into the show. I'm thinking.

I don't know, man. Any particular interviews cooking on your end or didn't, you know, is their schedule change? Yeah, yeah. Well, I put on an episode this week on Mercury and Debbie Colombo, because we just had the flyby. So I got to talk to one of the plasma physicists working on that, which was super cool. She was a blast. She was really great picks from the flyby.

Yeah, it's been a good show. So this was really fun. And then, yeah, I'm working on the next thing. So I really wanted to talk about Psyche on the show. But NASA's hush hush right now until that review is all done on the delay. So they're not being super forward with information just yet. So you have to wait a little longer for that one, I think. Maybe.

hopefully maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe they're really quick maybe it'll be really obvious I feel like that should be yeah I was hoping forward with that mission yeah I hope I I hope I go is that I was super psyched to see the extremely metal asteroid super psyched like so metal super psyched super psyched yeah uh Jake off nominal is off next week this is one of our two summer weeks off but the week after

yeah Christian Davenport will be with me you won't be oh cool but there should be some fun things happening. Yeah, I'll be traveling again. It's a little bit of a busy summer for me. But yeah, that's really cool. We're taking a week off. We've never done that before, but it's summer. All of you should be hanging out with your family and going to barbecues and stuff.

So that's what we're going to do. For sure. Nadia, thanks again for hanging out with us. We will have you back as soon as there's more JWST imagery because it might be a while apparently or maybe next week. anytime. I'm happy to come back. Yeah. We'll bring you on for the next mask cam Z drop. It'll be really good. That's a great idea. We're going to look at all great Mars picks and have a debate about whether or not they're cool looking. I will moderate.

Because as you know, Jake, there are certain deserts in the world that completely bore me. So, you know, if it's anything like the Mojave, I will be desperately bored during that show. And Nadia will be correct. If it's something more like the Sonoran Desert, I will be more excited. All right. Let's schedule that. That sounds fun. Yeah. Anytime.

All right. See you later, everybody. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.