Short Wave - Who Gets The First Peek At The Secrets Of The Universe?

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

The James Webb Space Telescope is by far the most powerful space-based telescope ever deployed by the United States. But it is only one instrument, and scientists all over the world have to share. The JWST's managers received more than 1,600 research proposals for what the telescope should look at. When an astronomer or a team does get some much-coveted telescope time, they currently get exclusive access to whatever data they collect for a full year. But there is a movement in astronomy to make most results open-access right away. That might speed up the pace of scientific discoveries and open up the data to a much wider set of researchers. On the other hand, some astronomers worry that instant open access would mostly benefit researchers who already have advantages. In this episode, NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce talks with Short Wave scientist in residence Regina G. Barber, who has firsthand experience competing for telescope time, about who gets dibs on the data, and how that could affect equity in astronomy.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey everyone, I'm Regina Barber, and today we're going to talk about the James Webb Space Telescope. That is, of course, the $10 billion three-story high floating observatory that launched just over a year ago. It's now out there about a million miles from Earth, staring out at alien planets and distant galaxies, and all kinds of wild stuff. And the excitement level among astronomers is astronomical. astronomical. The James Webb Space Telescope's managers just did this callout for proposals from scientists who want to use it. And they got over 1,600 different ideas for what it should look at. Wow. That's NPR's Nell Greenfield Voice. Hey there, Nell. Hey. So that number, over 1,600 proposals,

that's like a record. That's more than the Hubble Space Telescope ever got, more than this telescope got for its first year of its observations. And, you know, the bummer is, as you know, most of them will have to be rejected. I actually do know that. Being in this field, working with the Hubble Space Telescope images, I am so familiar with how competitive this process can be and how desperate astronomers are going to be to get their hands on new observations from the James Webb Telescope.

And that brings us to today's subject, a controversy that's inspiring strong feelings within the astronomy community. The folks who set policy for this telescope are thinking about doing something new, right? Yeah, they're talking about making all of the data collected by this telescope public right away. And that would be a big change because right now, if you're a scientist who proposes that the telescope looks at some galaxy or quasar or planet or whatever, and you're lucky enough to have your proposal accepted and the telescope looks at your thing and sends its

observations back to Earth, you then get a year, a whole year when you and only you have access to that. No one else can see it. Today on the show, who gets dibs on data and how it could affect fairness and equity in astronomy? I'm scientist and residence for Gina Barber, and this is shortly. Okay, now, maybe you should just lay out how this has worked in the past. Like when a scientist uses a telescope, what happens next? Well, for a long time, like centuries, if you used a telescope, you were the one making the observations. And so, as a result, you physically possessed the records of what you saw.

I was talking with Eric Smith about this. He works at the Science Mission Directorate in NASA headquarters, and he told me, you know, astronomers had exclusive access to what they'd seen and recorded. You know, originally it was just hand drawings and then it became glass plates, and then it was film in some cases and eventually it was magnetic tapes. And the model was whoever went to the observatory took those data home with them and they just put them in their office or they put them in some university vault. But starting with big space telescopes like Hubble, that old model just wasn't going to cut it.

Right, because in this case, the telescope operators point the telescope to where you ask them to. Then the data is beamed back to Earth. It gets sent to the scientist electronically. And it could be shared that way with many people all at once, potentially. Right. And a big expensive space telescope is this public resource paid for by tax dollars. So the idea originally was for Hubble and now James Webb Space Telescope that you wouldn't get to keep your data to your cell. forever. Like you would get some time. You're the one who came up with where to point the telescope and how. So they were going to give you like a year of exclusive access. And then after that, it becomes public information because the public paid for it. And so that was the model,

I would say, through the 80s and 90s. But he says now more and more, there's a real push for instantaneous open data. I see that last year the Biden administration came out with a statement about the federal government's position on open data, like basically saying that science agency should make federally funded research results public immediately, like ASAP. Yeah, NASA's science mission directorate just issued a policy, saying that all new missions should plan for data to be open access from the get-go. Now, Eric Smith told me that new policy doesn't require that old telescopes do away with their, you know, for your eyes only periods.

It has provisions for grandfathering in existing missions, saying, you know, they should make efforts towards reducing this period. When those reductions seem reasonable, you know, and it says international agreements take precedence over this goal. Now the James Webb Space Telescope involves agreements with Europe and Canada. So it's not like NASA can just make unilateral changes there. Okay, but clearly the trend is in the open data direction. Like, even for a James Webb Space Telescope, right? It seems that way. So the Space Telescope Science Institute is the organization that manages and operates this new telescope and Hubble, too.

They're currently surveying astronomers about how they'd feel about the new telescope going open access. I was talking with Alessandra Aloisi. She's head of the Science Mission Office at the Institute. The community fought very hard not to do that. I remember it was very controversial back there. She pointed out that about five years ago, a change was made so that, scientists who use Hubble only get six months of exclusive access to their observations instead of 12. And that was not popular at first. It will likely go in that direction, but it may take

a few years to get everybody on board, to get all the policies in place. I mean, I understand the argument that this could speed up scientific discoveries. And clearly, when you have an extraordinary telescope with a finite lifespan, this could seem like a good thing. Yeah, although if the science gets too fast, like if it's done in this mad rush, you know, it might get kind of sloppy. True. And it seems like this pressure on people racing to use this data is going to be intense. Astronomers worry about getting scooped that somebody will announce the same discovery that they're working on before they can, especially for somebody in their early career. The pressure can be overwhelming. Yeah, this happens even now when people have at least some time with the data all to

themselves, I was talking with this astronomer named Alat Glickman. She told me that writing a proposal to get a space telescope to look at something is a huge investment of time. I would say the first time I ever did a Hubble Space Telescope proposal, I must have spent about two weeks on it, like full time. So she's at Middlebury College, which is a small liberal arts college, and she has a big teaching load that limits how fast she can do her research. And she knows there's people out there who are ready to pounce the moment that an exclusive access period comes to an end. Like she told me she had this colleague who got an email from a competitor. And the competitor was like, look, I know your data is about to be public. I've written

some computer code that's going to go through it and generate these results right away. And, you know, we're going to have a paper done by the end of the week. Do you want to be a co-author or something? And like the poor guy was horrified. And that's with the proprietary period. So I worry that with the proprietary peers disappearing, this kind of thing will happen kind of like on the regular. People who have time, people who have resources will be able to jump in and kind of, I don't know, deflate the hard worker who, you know, earned that observation. She thinks just making everything public right away could mostly benefit people who already have an advantage. Right. But on the other hand, it seems like so few proposals get accepted in the first place for these space telescopes. So if everyone had

equal access to the data that could make things more fair, right? I mean, it's so complicated. You're not the only one who feels that way. Jackie Faradie is an astronomer with the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And she told me she's really conflicted about this. I mean, she's generally all in favor of open access to telescope data, but at the same time, I do not love the pressure that comes with a zero proprietary period. It puts a strange, amount of pressure and a mental gymnastics that you have to go through and doing your scientific work because you're constantly kind of processing whether or not somebody else is working on that data set. She experienced that recently with some quickly released data from this new space

telescope, like to show what it could do. So given her conflicted feelings, what does she think should be done? I asked her, I mean, she says maybe have the default be that data will be public immediately. But when people put their proposal in, you know, they could ask for an exception to that. Like, they could ask to have it be sort of just for them for maybe, you know, three or six months. How would they get this exception accepted? Well, that's the question. I mean, when I talked to Alessandra Aloisi, she suggested one example could be, you know, like what if the research was going to be part of a grad student's PhD thesis? Because those folks need more time to come up to speed, right? They're not as experienced. And so, you know, bringing up the

the next generation of astronomers is important to the field. But, you know, what about other important things? Like, you know, maybe a scientist has to work another job to support their family so they can't do research on nights or weekends. Or, you know, Jackie Faradie said, what if you're expecting a baby? I think you should be able to say, like, look, that data is going to roll in right when I deliver a human being out of my body. Could you maybe give me a six to 12 month proprietary period to ensure that I can participate in the scientific process at more of an equitable stage, that feels like easy. She said if she was on the committee making that decision, she'd be like, done, you've got it,

no problem. Wow, this actually sounds very familiar. But, Nell, if something changes for James Webb's Space Telescope, when would that happen? Oh, not for a while. I mean, you know, they're doing this survey and then the latest proposals for observation just came in. The people who get those proposals accepted will get the 12-month period. And so, you know, that round of science will go on to the middle of 2024. So, you know, nothing's going to happen for like another year and a half at least.

Okay. So we'll just have to wait and watch and see how this all unfolds. Keep us posted, please. I will. Thank you. Today's show was produced by Liz Metzger, edited by Gabriel Spitzer, and fact-checked by Anil Oza. The engineer was Valentina. Rodriguez Sanchez. Rebecca Ramirez is our supervising producer. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator.

Our senior director of programming is Beth Donovan. And the senior vice president of programming is Anya Grunman. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.