Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - James Webb Space Telescope Status Report from Deputy Program Director Eric Smith

Episode Date: February 6, 2012

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A new and powerful space telescope takes shape this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It's the James Webb Space Telescope, and it promises images that will outstrip. It's the James Webb Space Telescope, and it promises images that will outstrip the work of the beloved Hubble Space Telescope. We'll get a status report from Eric Smith, Deputy Program Director for the Webb at NASA headquarters.

Bill Nye is just back from New York and the premiere of his new Planetary Society videos high above Times Square. They couldn't see the stars from inside the Super Bowl, unless you count Madonna. Bruce Betts will tell those fans what they missed in this week's What's Up segment. First, though, Emily Lakdawalla and I were about 100 miles south of Los Angeles last Saturday. Emily, we're down in San Diego at the third annual SpaceUp Unconference, and it's been a pretty fun day. It has been a fun day. You know, you never know what you're going to get when you goUp UnConference, and it's been a pretty fun day. It has been a fun day. You know, you never know what you're going to get

when you go into an UnConference. At least I learned that's how they work. And so we've had an excellent day. I've learned about how to use social networking better. I've learned a lot about XCOR's Lynx suborbital space plane, and I learned a lot about what people want from the Planetary Society. So I think it's been very productive. Yeah, we had a special session and quite a turnout. A lot of very enthusiastic people

talking about where, the direction they'd like to see the society go in. And you've gotten in some arts and crafts too. Yeah, I've been sewing away at more spacecraft. I was inspired actually. There's several people here who are doing knitting and other things while they're listening to the talk. So there's kind of a crafty vibe here. And that's to say nothing of the Lego contest, Lego spaceship contest, which just won some people some tribbles.

Yeah, my favorite part of that Lego space contest actually was seeing Dave Mastin putting together a new space plane for Legos. Let's go on to the blog, what we normally talk about here. This terrific video which has come out from a camera which exists really just for people like us. Yeah, it's called MoonCam on Grail. normally talk about here, this terrific video which has come out from a camera which exists

really just for people like us. Yeah, it's called MoonCam on GRAIL and GRAIL is a gravity mission to the moon. It had no need for cameras but they put on a couple of very small cameras just for the public to use. Classrooms can sign up and take pictures of parts of the moon. And so their first video was released from a part of their orbit where they haven't gotten down into their very low orbit yet. So you see the whole globe of the moon, and it's the far side of the moon, the part that you don't ordinarily see.

So it's a really cool video. You ought to check it out. And this is just getting started, right? That's right. Only one of the two spacecraft is in its final science orbit. The other one is still working on getting down there, and they're going to start their science in early March and have about a three-month primary mission. So it's a February 1 entry in the Planetary Society blog, as usual, at planetary.org slash blog. Emily, we'll have more from the Space Upon Conference next week on the show,

a real quick summary, and I look forward to hearing your T-5 talk tonight. It's going to be fast. your T-5 talk tonight. It's going to be fast. And we will have that and some other video up on the website at planetary.org before long, if it's not there right now, including Emily's T-5. Emily, thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. She is the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill Nye. Bill, welcome back from New York. And even before you got back, we were sent this terrific photo way up on a screen above Times Square. There was the Planetary Society logo. Ah, yes, Toshiba Vision, the south end of Times Square. So this is a deal we've been working on for months. Toshiba gave the Planetary Society a grant to produce educational videos connected with the ExploraVision Scholarship Awards, which is adjudicated, administered, run by the National Science Teachers Association. So we have a partnership.

Toshiba National Science Teachers and the Planetary Society. And these videos answer viewer or user questions on Facebook. So we called it Consider the Following, which is an old Bill Nye expression. And you go on that Facebook page. Now the questions have been picked. You have to vote for them on Toshiba Innovations. It's going to be fun. We'll include people, I guess, all over the world, and I will produce a video answering your question. One of them is going to be about relativity and gravity. Another one is going to be about the nature of light and shadows, which, as you may know, I'm a big fan of with the study of shadows on Mars.

And then the others are going to be up to you to pick. The ones that are up there now is about exoplanets. It's fun. They're a lot of fun. And this was, you were shooting the one about how we protect spacecraft from too much heat. I was at the studio for that one, and it's great fun to watch. It's classic vintage science guy stuff. Vintage science guy. Now, is he getting too old, or is he really just hitting his stride? That'll be up to you to decide. Well, thank you. And now I hear you're off to the White House, and I guess we'll talk about that next week. Yeah, the second, maybe annual, White House Science Fair. Well, have a good trip. Another one back east. And Bill, we'll talk to you again

next time. Thank you, Matt. I got to fly. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. He is Bill Nye, Chief Executive Officer of the Planetary Society. He'll be back next week with some more commentary. We are going to be back in a few moments to get a report on the James Webb Space Telescope from Dr. Eric Smith, the Deputy Program Director at NASA headquarters. There's a full-size mock-up of the James Webb Space Telescope that has been making the rounds. The first thought I had when I saw it, this thing is huge. My second thought, this thing is complex and magnificent.

While it's still years from launch, many of the new scope's components are complete. What has not been entirely resolved is the controversy over whether NASA and the space science community can afford it. At a cost now estimated at nearly $7 billion, there are researchers who fear the web will soak up funds that might have gone to other worthy projects within and beyond our solar system. Congress has also taken an interest. Eric Smith of NASA is trying to allay those fears. He also says the Webb will contribute to planetary science, including the search for and analysis of planets circling other stars.

Eric is the Deputy Program Director for the James Webb Space Telescope. I got him on the phone a few days ago. Eric, thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio. Oh, well, I'm delighted to join you guys, Matt. And I hear that you actually stepped out of a review meeting. Well, this is a regular monthly meeting, and they are day-long meetings, so I guess I should be thanking you for giving me the opportunity to step out. long meeting, so I guess I should be thanking you for giving me the opportunity to step out.

Yeah, so it's a standard meeting where all elements of the observatory are statused, as they say, to make a verb out of it. We learn, you know, what elements are, how they're progressing along, what's coming up in the schedule next. This is, of course, a very exciting time for Webb in the coming year, because over this next year is when we're going to be taking delivery of the flight instruments, the cameras and spectrographs are going to be returning all that great science. So it's nice seeing all that hard work starting to come together. Those mirrors as well, was that part of the status report? I hear that they're coming along. Yes. Well, in fact, that wasn't so much a big item this month because they were completed last month. But the exciting news there is that as of the end of December, we have all our flight mirrors polished and they meet their requirements. So we're looking forward to the fantastic images that Webb is going to return.

They'll look to, you know, the casual observer just like a Hubble picture. the casual observer, just like a Hubble picture. So they'll be just as sharp, but they'll be in the near and mid-infrared rather than Hubble, which is visible and a little near-infrared, and also a little ultraviolet. Would you please, I know you've done this probably many times, but give us a bit more of a comparison to the Hubble Space Telescope, which you're in a great position to do because you were at one time the program scientist for both missions,

the JWST and the Hubble. Yeah, I had two of the greatest jobs at NASA there doing that. So, well, everyone knows that Hubble is very similar to a telescope you might look through on the ground here in that it's optimized for visible light. Now, of course, it returns those gorgeous images because it's above the atmosphere that blurs a lot of the things we see. Hubble's diameter, the diameter of the primary mirror, is about 2.4 meters in diameter. Now, Webb will be six and a half meters in diameter. So sort of seven times the area, you could almost think of that as like about 100 times the power that Hubble has.

So it will be looking farther out into the universe, deeper, because it can collect photons faster than Hubble. It will be investigating some of the science that Hubble does at certain redshifts out to greater redshifts. But for the folks who are involved in the Planetary Society, it will be able to do a lot of different investigations of planetary bodies within our own solar system because Webb's coverage is near and mid-infrared. And I think also very excitingly, it will continue the science that Hubble has begun on exoplanets, but be able to do that a lot better because of its larger mirror. And I'm glad that you mentioned things happening within the solar system, because it was just

a couple of days ago, as we speak, that I got a press release inviting scientists, astronomers, to come to a workshop that's a few months away to sort of, what is it going to do, to help prepare them to do science with the JWST? Well, yeah, you're referring to, there's a DPS meeting, Division of Planetary Science meeting in Reno. I think it's in October this year. And so some of the folks on the Webb team, some of the planetary scientists we have on the team, will be out there to help inform the planetary scientists about the capabilities of Webb. Because I'm sure many of the listeners might think,

well, you know, Webb was built as this distant universe machine, and that's really all it does, and there's nothing in it for me. Well, in fact, it has a lot of capability within the solar system, and what we want to do is make sure folks are aware of just what kind of science you could be doing within our own solar system or with, you know, nearby exoplanets with Webb. Now, the one restriction it does have that Hubble doesn't have is because of the architecture of Webb, it cannot look at any of the interior planets because we don't have a telescope tube,

but rather a sunshade. That means we just have to look at things from Earth and out in the solar system. Well, even Hubble doesn't much like to look at Mercury, right? Because you're worried about the instruments on that one as well. But there's certainly plenty to look at in the outer solar system. What is the significance of this being a primarily infrared instrument? And does that have to do with its value being out there, well out into space?

Yeah, the original impetus for, I guess, the killer app science for Webb was the very distant universe and following the story of the creation of stars and galaxies back to their very origin. Because of the cosmological redshift, the light that comes from these objects in the ultraviolet and visible when they're young is shifted into the infrared, near-infrared part of the spectrum. So if we wanted to follow those earliest objects, we had to have a facility that was optimized for that. And so that was the basis whereby we decided that, you know, these are the wavelengths that Webb needs to cover. And then knowing the sizes of these objects, that also told us roughly this is what the diameter of your mirror needs to be

to get those same Hubble-like sharp images. We sometimes report on the very, very big telescopes that are being built or at least planned, down here on the surface of the planet. Right. In fact, we in the Webb community are really looking forward to these ground-based facilities coming online around the same time that Webb does, because they'll be very complementary. Their much larger mirror diameters will enable them to get the same kind of sharp images that Webb will be returning in the near-infrared they'll be doing in the optical. So it's a perfect complement. Now, we're out beyond the atmosphere

and we're away from the very hot body that is the Earth. And so if you're going to be looking at near-infrared and mid-infrared heat radiation, you want to be away from the roughly 290 Kelvin source that the Earth is. That's Eric Smith, NASA's Deputy Program Director for the James Webb Space Telescope. He'll be back after our break. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth.

That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us.

You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're talking with NASA scientist Eric Smith about the JWST,

the James Webb Space Telescope. Eric is Deputy Program Director for the Webb, which has lately made good progress toward the planned 2018 launch that will send it to L2, the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point, about a million and a half kilometers from Earth. When we first were coming up with the science case for Webb, those requirements that would drive the design, we grouped them into several categories, and two of the ones associated with the distant universe

were this, the birth of the first stars and galaxies, watching the universe light up after the Big Bang, watching the assembly of galaxies. So as galaxies build themselves up, as stars evolve and begin to create heavy elements, watch how the universe turned in from that very infant stage into the things we recognize today. One of the other important properties of an infrared optimized telescope is that it can see through interstellar dust much better than you can in the visible. Now, when stars and planetary systems are born within our own galaxy, they are shrouded in dust that prevents even the largest ground-based telescopes

from seeing what's going on behind those clouds. With an infrared telescope, we'll be able to do that. So that's another very important piece of galactic science that we'll be doing. And then there's finally, and this only became, we became aware of this as the incredible number of exoplanets began to be found, that the facility we have will be very capable for studying those as well. Yeah, it would seem that you might have another complementary relationship there with instruments like Kepler.

Oh, exactly. Another complementary relationship there with instruments like Kepler. Oh, exactly. In fact, NASA is studying several Explorer mission concepts right now that would also investigate exoplanets and find even more targets that you might then turn Webb on to later. Let's talk a little bit more about the Webb itself and the technology that it represents. This is quite a complex machine. You only have to look at it to be able to see that.

But are there technologies here that are advancing us in ways that are going to help with other kinds of instruments and conduct of science? Sure. I think Webb, in many ways, breaks technological barriers for putting large facilities, large science facilities into space. Of course, NASA has built a very large facility, the space station that's up there, but that doesn't have some of the same requirements that a facility like Webb does. So, for example, one of the things we need to do is to be able to hold our segmented mirrors

very rigidly in place. You basically have to hold them steady and know the position of them down to several tens of nanometers, or about a ten-thousandth diameter of a human hair. You've got to know where this very large mirror is. You've got to control your 18 segments to work as one mirror, which is something they've done on the ground, but we'll be doing that in space now for the first time. We've got this big sun shield rather than the tube. Most people look at that and want to know what that is. Well, each of those membranes, there are

five of them, it's about the size of a tennis court, and the thickness of each one is less than about a half of the thickness of a piece of paper. So we have to know how to control the deployment of those very precisely so we know where every piece of that tennis court-sized piece of paper is at every moment. There are, of course, the very sensitive detectors that I think JWST, the figures at JWST would be able to see a single candle lit on the moon from about a million kilometers away. Wow. It is, of course, an expensive mission, and there has been concern about that. But I guess the indications are that the things are on track now for a launch.

What are you shooting for? 2018 was the launch that was approved last year when we did have a major review because of the expense of Webb and some of the delays that we were experiencing with the hardware development. It's certainly fair for the taxpayers to examine and through their representatives at Congress to examine something like this. And so we had this review, and there was an independent body that did this review, and they concluded that technically the facility was moving along just fine. There were issues that had to do with its management, and so management changes were made.

Some folks moved around, and now over the past year, we've demonstrated very good progress staying within the budget and on schedule. And I think that performance helped Congress and folks in the administration realize, okay, this is going well now. And they certainly heard from the public and the science community how critical this facility is for science. And it's something that, as we've done, as we do the easy experiments, the subsequent or follow-on ones do get more expensive.

And so this is something that's starting to hit all fields. If you just look at something like the Mars program, the rovers get bigger and bigger each time. Interesting you mention the rovers, because the two things that make me most nervous, that I hope go perfectly, The two things that make me most nervous that I hope go perfectly, the landing of Curiosity in August, which frankly scares me a lot because I really want it to work. And I really want JWST to unfold and start building on the legacy of Hubble a few years after that. So it is great to get this update from you, Eric. And I hope that we can do it again, perhaps, as we get closer to launch. Sure, I'd be happy to chat with you any time, Matt. Thank you so much.

Eric Smith is the James Webb Space Telescope Deputy Program Director. He's at NASA headquarters. He has a great background for this job because he was both, as we said earlier, the Hubble and the Webb, the JWST program scientist. That was going on at the same time. Now his efforts going into this most ambitious telescope ever planned for placement in space. Some personal thoughts, if you'll indulge me. It is prudent to be concerned about cost overruns, and there is good reason to fight for research that might be pushed aside by grander projects.

But there is value in all well-conducted science, large and small. A civilization's value is in no small part measured by how much it has expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. Were it up to me, pushing those boundaries out to the edge of the universe would be high on any list of national goals and worthy of investment at every level. I welcome your comments. Look for my entry on this topic in the Planetary Society blog. Bruce Betts is moments away. Hey, hey, how about those Giants?

They were giant. That was a pretty good game, wasn't it? Referring, of course, to the Super Bowl. I don't know. Can we say Super Bowl? We're not selling anything except the night sky, so I guess we can. That was a surprisingly good game. I was happy to have watched it. Very happy for those New York fans and very sad for those New England fans.

Yeah, my brother-in-law is dancing in the streets. Of course, he's in Florida now, so that maybe there are plenty of New Yorkers down there. Anyway, how's the night sky? And how are you? Well, I'm fine. I'm still wondering, you know, why the Vikings weren't in the Super Bowl, but other than that, I'm fine. Apparently,

you have to win more than two games in a season. I was going to say. I don't know. I could tell you why they weren't there, but you wouldn't like the answer. You already know it. So anyway, in the night sky, Mars is the thing to focus on. It's red. It's getting bright.

It's beautiful. I saw it last night. It was lovely. It's coming up around 8 p.m. in the east. It is brightening rapidly as it approaches its March 3rd opposition and looks like a very bright reddish-orangish star over in the east in the mid to late evening. Giving you a really big random space fact type opposition. Opposition! Oh, God. Gives me chills. Okay, go ahead.

And Venus still dominating the early evening. Over in the west, super bright, and Jupiter in the south also very bright, but not as bright as Venus, but brighter than Mars. So all sorts of bright stars. Also dimmer yellowish Saturn coming up around 11 at night in the east and high up in the south in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history. It was 20 years ago this week that the Ulysses spacecraft flew by Jupiter. That's right. The sun studying Ulysses

spacecraft, very successful, very long lived, flew by Jupiter in order to, went out in order to go in, in that weird orbital mechanics kind of way, to change its plane and fly over the poles of the sun and do all sorts of interesting studies of that. Yeah, very cool. If you look at the diagram of that on any article about the Ulysses spacecraft, it's just amazing to watch what this thing does. Whoop, like that, up and out. It made that noise, too, but no one could hear it because it was in space.

In space, no one can hear you. Whoop. You know, I really want to do the next segment all in the sound of whoop, but I can't figure out how to do it. Maybe we'll be inspired. So we move on to Random Space Fact. No, that just sounded like Scooby-Doo. I know.

Scooby's near and dear to my heart. I have trouble separating from Scooby. Random Space Fact. About 90 missions. Can you believe it? 90 missions have been flown or attempted to the moon, including flybys, orbiters, landers, robotic astronauts. The exact number depends on how you count some missions that had two spacecraft. And the most recent mission example does have two spacecraft,

and it just got there in the last few weeks. That's the GRAIL mission with the recently named Ebb and Flows spacecraft. Yeah, which Emily talked about the camera on there in her commentary tonight, so very appropriate. Yes, or as someone I was telling their names misheard me, thought they were Ed and Flo, which has a totally different imagery to it. Or Flo and Eddie. Flo and Eddie, there you go. We move on to the trivia contest.

A fine question, I thought. Two of the categories of objects for what makes up dark matter are machos and wimps. What do macho and wimp stand for in this context? How do we do math? Well, first, a couple of the more entertaining entries that we got. The first one from John McCartan. John McCartan in Plano, Illinois. He is obviously a wrestling fan. He said that Macho Man Randy Savage picked that because they

didn't think very highly of his first choice, the Brown Dwarf Randy Savage. That's a whole other arm of wrestling there. Oh, that's different. Okay, here's my favorite, though. This came from Ian, Ian Jackson. Ian decided that we needed to combine the two to get a particularly massive and dense thing out there. WIMP Machos. And here's what it stands for. Weekly infusions of Matt's Plan Rad makes all citizens happy, obviously. Wow. Well happy, obviously. Wow.

Well done. Wow, that's quite an acronym. You want to know who really won, though? Yes, I do. Terrence K. Patt of Phoenix, Arizona. Terrence, who said WIMPs are weakly interacting massive particles and macho stands for massive compact halo object. Indeed they are so machos or objects uh can range from small stars to super massive black hole sizes they're made of ordinary matter matter they they

don't know what they are they could be various stuff wimps subatomic particles which are not made up of ordinary matter they They're weakly interacting. They can pass through ordinary matter without any effects, much like much of the evening's TV. That's true. Well, Terrence, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, and somebody else is going to answer this next question correctly and get another one of those. All right. We talked about spacecraft going to the moon.

question correctly and get another one of those. Alright, we talked about spacecraft going to the moon. Here's a question that I went to answer myself and I found some surprises. What countries have had their spacecraft go beyond Earth orbit? And I've selected

my words carefully, hopefully, although it's still, you will find gray areas so we will be flexible. What countries have had their spacecraft go beyond Earth orbit? Going to the moon doesn't count. If that's all you did, you're still in orbit around the Earth. So beyond that, off into heliocentric orbits and such. Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Find out how to entry. We're looking for the countries or in the case of let's just say it the european space agency you can just say european space agency not list all the member countries but other than that we're looking for countries plus the european space agency all right you have until the 13th of this month of february at 2 p.m on monday that'd be pacific time 2 p.m on the 13th of febru, to get us your answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about magic. Sorcery.

Thank you, and good night. Been doing that Dungeons & Dragons stuff again with the boys, huh? Yeah, I have. He's the Dungeon Master. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation

and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.