Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Visiting the AAS Meeting for a JWST Update and More

Episode Date: January 14, 2013

The 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society was a great place to learn about the James Webb Space Telescope from Jason Kalirai and Dean C. Hines.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To the edge of the universe and beyond, 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. They call it the Super Bowl of Astronomy. And this year the American Astronomical Society brought its annual meeting to my hometown of Long Beach, California. We'll get a tiny sample of the 1900 events and posters and then sit down with a couple of astronomers

who are part of the James Webb Space Telescope team. My colleague Emily Lakdawalla also attended the conference, and on Friday, January 11, she and I visited a Northrop Grumman facility to see how the JWST is coming together. Emily, did you find that tour at Northrop Grumman as interesting as I did? Well, it's always fun to get up close and personal with spacecraft hardware, although I should hasten to add that we didn't actually see any hardware that's intended to be sent into space that's still all in the prototype stage at

this point, but still very cool. The bus is hopefully the part that should give them the least amount of headaches. It seems almost like an afterthought stuck on the underside of the spacecraft. It's on what they call the hot side of the spacecraft. The telescope's main feature is these five-layer blanket that is supposed to prevent the sun from heating up its infrared instruments too much. And so most of the cool stuff is on the cool side of the spacecraft, so to speak. But the bus is this thing that's just such a tiny spacecraft stuck on the hot side. And yet when you walk up to it up close, it seems like as big as a human capsule. It's a large spacecraft. Yeah. By the way, folks, when you walk up to it up close, it seems like as big as a human capsule.

It's a large spacecraft. Yeah. By the way, folks, if you want to see how this multilayer insulation, this sunshield works, we've got a terrific video from our boss, the science guy. I'll put up a link to it at planetary.org slash radio. You know, we had a lot of people talking about their concerns about the deployment of this spacecraft. Do you share any of those concerns? Yeah, I have to admit that I do. You know, there's so many different things that could go wrong that would impact the mission. It was actually Heidi Hamel who answered that question from one of the

reporters on the tour. And Heidi said that there are certain things that are worrisome, but the spacecraft can work even if some of these deployments fail. For instance, the two side panels of mirrors that have to fold out to make the gigantic full-size mirror, if that folding doesn't happen properly, they'll still have a large mirror. The science will be impacted, but they will be able to go on with the mission. Similarly, with the heat shield, the thermal blankets not deploying, that would be really, really bad, but at least they would still have this great big mirror in space. The scary thing is the unfolding of the secondary mirror, because that gigantic primary mirror is no good unless the light that it gathers can be reflected

off of the secondary onto the optical bench, onto the instruments. And there's no backup for that. If that thing fails to unfold, there is absolutely no mission. So I think I agree with Heidi that that's the part that terrifies me the most. Now, I must say that after hearing everything we did about this spacecraft, I feel much more confident. And to quote one of the people who was along with us on the tour, well, curiosity made it. So maybe this thing will as well. And it certainly will be exciting if it properly unfolds out there and starts telling us more about the universe. It does seem more possible now that I've seen hardware. Still, it terrifies me. But then, honestly, curiosity terrified me too. And when it landed, I think there was several minutes of,

I can't believe it actually worked. I can't believe it actually worked. And I'm sure I'll be thinking the same things before and after JWST's launch and deployments. Let's hope that that happens in what, about four or five years from now when that takes place. Emily, thanks so much once again. I'll talk to you next week. You're welcome, Matt. See you then. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Catch her Google Plus Hangouts.

We have those available at planetary.org as well. They're every week, Thursdays at noon Pacific time. Up next, Bill Nye, the science guy, CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, you know that we're going to be talking about the James Webb Space Telescope today. One thing I don't get into in my conversation is the bit of... Eight billion dollars. That's it, the controversy about this in the scientific community. You've given this some thought. Oh, yeah.

Well, I've had calls from other people in the planetary community. People wanted me to come out against the James Webb Space Telescope because it was taking money from planetary science. First of all, the problem was much harder than anybody realized. That is to say, to put this extraordinary telescope in a halo orbit out in the middle of outer space almost nowhere, it's a very hard problem. The way it was funded, there was a minimum-sized workforce, if I may. So you had to keep this workforce going while they waited, while we waited for funding to be voted for. And so that just adds cost. And then the way the thing is done, and this is an old problem at NASA, or is it an old wonderful thing?

It's a blessing and a curse, Matt. It's a blurs. These different parts are manufactured in different parts of the world. And so it spreads the work out, but it also adds to a lot of shipping costs and coordination and working cooperation problems that generally add cost. Maybe lowers the overall cost per center or per manufacturer, but it raises the cost of the entire program. I'm telling you, Matt, James Webb is going to be the next Hubble telescope. The images and the discoveries

made by the James Webb Space Telescope have the potential, Matt, as I'm so fond of saying, of changing the world. I look forward to hearing the interview. Yeah, it's a terrific conversation if I do say so myself. Thank you so much, Bill.

And I look forward to talking to you again next week. I'll be standing by. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. Who is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Who is the CEO of the Planetary Society. I'll be right back with Jason Calloway and Dean Hines of the James Webb Space Telescope Project. Nearly 3,000 astronomers, educators, students and reporters packed the convention center in Long Beach, California last week for the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It was so exciting to be surrounded by men and women

who are pushing back the frontiers of knowledge about our universe. Among them was Natalie Ambatala of San Jose State University and the nearby NASA Ames Research Center, where she is part of the Kepler science team. In her plenary address titled, Finding the Next Earth, Natalie summarized the findings and ongoing mission of that amazing spacecraft. Listen for the crowd's reaction when thousands of new dots suddenly appear on the giant screen behind her. Each of those dots is likely to be a newly discovered planet in our galaxy. So this is the current state of the

situation. There are about 650 planets represented there, confirmed planets that are not Kepler planets. And so in the last three years, Kepler has detected many what we'll call planet candidates. And we have confirmed and characterized about 100 or so, which I'll show you later. I'm going to add the Kepler planet candidates that we have found so far

to this diagram at the risk of giving away the end of the story preemptively and I feel justified in putting candidates in this plot because we're learning as the years have gone by that the reliability of this catalog is quite high it's likely that 90% or more of these candidates are going to be bona fide planets and so the situation has changed a little bit since Kepler launched It's likely that 90% or more of these candidates are going to be bona fide planets. And so the situation has changed a little bit since Kepler launched. From this diagram, it's easy to understand why really there's probably not a single exoplanet scientist in the country that is not working right now on Kepler data.

Kepler has transformed the field of exoplanet science, and it's easy to see why. As I said, Kepler is not designed to find Earth 2.0. We wouldn't probably recognize it if we did see it, because we don't know about the atmosphere. We might not even know the mass. The question that Kepler is designed to answer, however, is what is the fraction of stars in our galaxy that harbor potentially habitable Earth-sized planets? Very simple question. It's a statistical mission. So we've got kind of a timeline here showing various milestones that the team has reached over the last three and a half years. And at the right-hand side of this diagram, it says the search continues. And that's because Kepler finished its baseline mission in November of 2012. So with the end of the baseline mission,

November of 2012. So with the end of the baseline mission, we relaxed a little. We feel like we've taken enough data now that we will be able to get out an interesting result at the end of the day. Nevertheless, we have shown and we have demonstrated, now that we know a lot about the stars that we're observing, now that we know a lot about the stars that we're observing, that it behooves us to continue observing for another four years in order to get a robust statistic on the frequency of Earth-sized planets, this number 8 or Earth. And so NASA awarded us an extended mission for another four years.

But not all the exoplanets are discovered by Kepler. How about worlds circling a neutron star? Pulsar planets. Exotic enough for you? Well, wait until you hear what one of them may be made of from Alexander Wolksan of Penn State University. One thing that is especially interesting about neutron star planets is that three systems have been discovered so far, one of which is the original three planets around 1257 plus 12. The second one is a Jupiter mass planet around a binary system in the global cluster M4. So with all my great respect for what Kepler people have been doing, the first circumbinary planet has been found long ago around that particular pulsar.

That's very, very true. ago around that particular pulsar. That's very, very true. And then the third one is a very recently found planet around the millisecond pulsar, which is a stripped-down version of what used to be a star, because that thing started out in the closed binary system with a vicious pulsar. It ate it or evaporated it away over time, and what's left now is a Jupiter-sized and Jupiter-mass object in a very quick orbit around that Pulsar, probably consisting of carbon, mostly, compressed to the point that it could actually be just one huge diamond. Up next is my complete conversation with astronomers Jason Calleray and Dean C. Hines

about the James Webb Space Telescope. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Jason Calleroy is Deputy Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope Project

at the Space Telescope Science Institute. His colleague, Dean C. Hines, is working on one of the instruments that will soon be carried into deep space as part of that complex and powerful instrument. Jason and Dean joined me in the press room at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, where anticipation of the JWST was on many minds. Here is my complete and fascinating conversation with them. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Gentlemen, thanks so much for taking a couple of minutes out of your busy day here in Long Beach at the AAS conference to talk with us a little bit about JWST.

It's great to be here, Matt. Thanks. Great. Thanks a lot, Matt, for coming. It has been a good year since we really talked with anybody specifically about the status of the project. And so, Jason, maybe you can start us off. Tell us where things are. Sure. So that's a great question.

So the JWST, or the James Webb Space Telescope, was the top priority in the decadal survey that astronomers wrote in 2000. So it's been a while. And they outlined a number of science questions that we needed to address in astronomy, and it required a much bigger, bolder telescope than we had in the past. And so as we've used the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope, the other great observatories and small explorer missions, they've made huge advances in our knowledge of the universe,

but they've also opened up new mysteries. And the James Webb Space Telescope is the future telescope that we think will answer some of those questions. So one of the main science goals is to push further back into the universe than we've ever been able to do before and to seek the universe's first stars and galaxies. Hasn't the Hubble just sort of hit the wall of what it's capable of doing thanks to what, the redshift? That's right. So with Hubble, we can open up Hubble's shutters for a long, long time and take very, very deep images of the universe and measure high redshift galaxies. And the galaxies that Hubble's been able to detect formed several hundred million years after the Big Bang happened.

It's very difficult to go deeper with Hubble because these galaxies are extremely faint. And their light is also redshifted because they're so far away that Hubble sensitivity in the optical band passes and a little bit in the near infrared doesn't pick these galaxies up efficiently. So to push beyond Hubble, what we need is a telescope that's much more powerful, that has a much bigger mirror, so we can collect more photons, but then also extend into the infrared part of the spectrum where the light is redshifted. And that's really what JWST is going to, pardon the pun, focus on. That's right.

So in the infrared bandpasses, the James Webb Space Telescope will be much more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. The primary mirror is much larger. The instruments are going to be more sensitive. They have larger fields of view. And it extends all the way out to mid-infrared wavelengths. So it includes a little bit of the optical part, the entire near-infrared part,

and then also the mid-infrared part of the spectrum. So it almost builds on Spitzer in the mid-infrared. In other words, Spitzer was a smaller telescope that went out to the mid-infrared, but this is sort of like Spitzer 2.0 as well, in that we can do some of the capabilities that Spitzer had, but with more detail. So i like to think of it as kind of the best of hubble and spitzer but at much greater power because it will have the smaller pixels that hubble has so you'll get very sharp clear crisp images of the universe but you'll be observing the universe at the same wavelengths as spitzer and so with a larger mirror higher resolution and near infrared you open up an

entirely new parameter space for discovery in the universe. So you've got to be used to people asking, okay, but how much bigger, how much more powerful is this than Hubble, or maybe more appropriately Spitzer, since it's another infrared instrument? I mean, what do you come back with? So that's a great question. So what I would say is that if you want to do the same kind of science that you've done with Hubble and Spitzer with the James Webb Space Telescope, it's easily, you know, 10 times more powerful. In some modes, it's more than 100 times more powerful. But the James Webb Space Telescope has many complex modes of operation

that we've never even had in space-based astrophysics before. For example, we have a micro shutter array on this telescope. When we look at the universe with large ground-based telescopes, we can physically put a sheet of metal on the focal plane of the camera, cut little slitlets in that sheet of metal and allow light from certain objects to come in. And then we disperse that light and get a spectrum and understand the chemical composition or the velocities of different objects. Well, how would you do that from space? Technology had to be created to solve that problem for space-based astronomy. And so on the James Webb Space Telescope, there's a micro shutter array that has thousands of these tiny micro shutters that can be all controlled magnetically.

And you can open up different configurations to probe different objects and then move to an entirely different field of the universe and open up a different set of microarrays. So we've never had that capability before. So how you define how much more powerful JWST is than Hubble or Spitzer is impossible because it's an entirely, it's infinitely better. So we won't know until it's out there doing what it's supposed to do. Yeah, that's right. I think it'll solve certain questions that we can frame right now. But if Hubble and Spitzer are any examples, the biggest scientific discoveries

that come from these missions usually are surprises. I want to come back later to talking about some of these instruments, which, Dean, I know you're very much involved with the development of one of them, because they are pretty amazing devices in themselves as a part of this overall system. Yeah, they're powerhouses. But what about the status? I mean, not everything has always gone smoothly with this project. That's right. Well, every project. Okay, that's fair. So what happened with the James Webb Space Telescope is that after astronomers formulated

the requirements, the scientific requirements, the parts of the telescope were being constructed. And the budget that the program had didn't allow for a lot of wiggle room in terms of problems that almost always arise when you're doing a new project, especially a big, bold project, the biggest space telescope we've ever created, developing new technology specifically for that program. And so what ended up happening was as problems came up, the work was pushed out. And so the schedule started slipping, and that makes a project more expensive. So two years ago, a new budget was put forth for the James Webb Space Telescope, and a new schedule was established to launch it in October 2018. And since we've had that budget, we can deal with the problems as they

come up. So we've still had the same problems that we've had before, but now we can fix them as we see them and not delay the schedule. So over the last two years, many of the major project milestones and the deliverables have actually moved up in the schedule and been delivered earlier, whereas before they were always being pushed out. What I have read is that all of the technological challenges have been met very well, but there were some management things that had to be resolved. Yeah, that's right. So right now with the telescope, all of the primary mirrors are done.

And this is one of the major milestones for the project. These mirrors take seven years to produce from the time that you mine the beryllium in Utah to molding the mirror segment, to gold coating it, to putting the actuators on the back, cryo testing it. And they bounce around to 14 different pit stops across the U.S. during their formation time. And all 18 primary mirror segments, the secondary, the tertiary, the fine steering mirror, all of the mirrors are finished. And they all meet spec. They look great.

Dean, do you want to talk about the science instruments? A little bit. I just want to mention and remind people that they can always see pictures of the actual hardware as it's being built at the Goddard website. So if your viewers or your listeners want to see that. We'll put up a link to it from the page at planetary.org slash radio. Sounds good. So there are four primary science instruments.

There's the NEARIS, Near Infrared Imaging Spectrograph. I've got to remember these acronyms. You don't want to offend any colleagues. NASA's total acronyms. We've got the NIRCAM, NIR Infrared Camera. We also have the NIRSPEC, which is NIR Infrared Spectrograph, and Jason was talking about the micro-shutters. That's where you use the shutters. Yeah, there's also other capabilities on that. And then the instrument I work on is the mid-infrared instrument, MIRI.

And that sort of takes Spitzer and takes it to the next level. We've got imaging. We've also got chronography, which is the first time that space-based chronography has ever been done in the mid-infrared. Chronography is where you basically put a spot over the star so you can see the stuff that's around a bright spot. So it's like a coronagraph? It is very much a coronagraph.

Yeah, there's three of them in there, and I'll talk a little bit about that later when we talk about science. And then we also have a new kind of spectrograph for the mid-infrared that's never been flown called an integral field spectrograph. Basically what this does is it's like taking an image, but at every point in the image you get a spectrum. So this is brand new technology. It's something that we would like to have done with Spitzer, but now we can do it with

JWST. That instrument's been delivered, and so has the near-infrared imaging spectrograph. The other two instruments are almost finished, and so we're really well along with theST. That instrument's been delivered, and so has the near-infrared imaging spectrograph. The other two instruments are almost finished, and so we're really well along with the capabilities. How big of an advance do these instruments represent over what has been available in other telescopes to date? So that's a good question as well. So I think the instruments are different in nature to what we've had on other missions. So if we take Hubble as an example for as a comparison, on Hubble, the instruments are relatively simple compared to the instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope.

As Dean was talking about on this mid-infrared instrument, you've got imaging capabilities, coronagraphy capabilities, you've got integral field spectroscopy. There's lots of different modes to the instruments. And they kind of have to be built that way because there's no way to service the James Webb Space Telescope. With Hubble, you know, as the instruments got older and new technologies emerged and we wanted to enable new modes of operation, astronauts went up, they swapped out the old instruments, they put in the new ones.

With the James Webb Space Telescope, we don't have that opportunity. So from the get-go, the instruments are very complex. And they have to be tested. That's the other thing that people need to understand is because we can't go fix them if something breaks, we have to do a lot of extra testing on the ground. That breaks things. What is the progress with the instruments? Some of them have been delivered, haven't they? Yeah, like I said, two of them, MIRI and NIRIS,

the Near Infrared Imaging Spectrograph, are delivered. NIRCAM, I don't know the schedule for that, but they're basically finished. They're in their final stages of testing before they get delivered. So by delivery, what we mean is an infrared instrument was built in part by the European Space Agency. NIRIS was built by the Canadian Space Agency. So when we say delivery, what we mean is that the agencies have delivered those instruments to the Goddard Space Flight Center.

And at NASA, now they're going to undergo further tests and also integration into the housing that holds all of the science instruments together, which we call the integrated science instrument module. So at this point, you're starting the phase of the project where all of the different pieces are coming together and becoming assembled. So those two instruments look great, and the other two instruments are going to be delivered in 2013. With that statement, you've already begun to, you know, introduce that this is, like so many missions nowadays, one that is really international. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

So the European Space Agency is a huge partner here. They're even launching the telescope. It's going to be launched on a European Space Agency rocket. They're also building the near-infrared spectrograph for the James Webb Space Telescope. The Canadian Space Agency has been a wonderful partner as well. One of the neat things about being an astronomer today is that you do get to be involved in these big projects with all these people from all over the world. That's been really exciting. It gives not only a chance to experience the other cultures, but it's good to get a different perspective. So over the next

couple of years, as these instruments come in, the instruments will be cryo-tested at the Goddard Space Flight Center. After that, what happens is there's other components to the telescope, like the primary mirrors. There's a huge sun shield that's being created that will protect the telescope and keep it cold. The sun shield will always keep the sun and the Earth and the moon on one side of the telescope. That's that multi-layer thing that's underneath it.

That's right. The size of a tennis court. The size of a tennis court. It's huge, yeah. And there's a huge temperature gradient across the sun shield. So you're talking about several hundred degrees between the hot side and the cold side. So it keeps the optics and the primary mirror, all of the science instruments, very cold on the top side of the telescope. And so the sun shield is being developed.

The spacecraft is being developed. And so all of those pieces will come together over the next couple of years. And then one of the remarkable things that we're going to do with this telescope is do a full-out test before we launch it at the Johnson Space Center. So there's a massive chamber at the Johnson Space Center. It's called Chamber A. It's the same chamber that folks probably saw in one of the Transformers movies. You see the door swinging out. It's got the Autobot symbol on there. They tested the lunar. For those of us who are old enough to remember, that's where they tested the lunar landers and the command module as well. So it's a big chamber.

It's a huge chamber, but it had to be completely retrofitted for the James Webb Space Telescope because the temperature that you need to drop it to to mimic the environment of the telescope in space is much cooler. So there's new helium shrouds, nitrogen shrouds. There's a new clean room that was built. And the telescope is going to sit in this chamber, and you're going to use optical stimulus to make sure everything's working fine. So that's a test that will happen just before launch. And then we're expecting launch in October 2018. Is it actually going to deploy in that chamber?

And if it is, how does that simulate the weightless environment? So that's a great question as well. So it won't actually deploy in the chamber. The deployment will happen in space, but all of the parts that are being used for the deployment are tested on the ground first. But the deployment will happen shortly after, you know, just days after the telescope launches. It'll start to deploy. The telescope itself, though, we will open it fully. We launch with it folded, but we will open the telescope, but we won't deploy the sunshield.

There's a pillar that holds the instruments and the telescope. We won't be doing that stuff. The whole telescope itself, with all the mirrors and the instruments, will be the thing that we test at Johnson. While we're talking about deployment, think back to that amazingly tense day not long ago when Curiosity landed. And we were all thinking,

this can't work, this can't work, it's too complicated. Okay, we got through that one. Looking at the JWST and anybody who hasn't seen it has got to see this amazing device. How concerned are people that something's not going to unfold the way it's supposed to? Let me just say one quick thing. I know Jason has a lot to say about it, but that was seven minutes of terror. Yes, right. We have more like a few months on the edge of our seats.

So it's not quite terror because things happen a lot slower for us. And if something does go a little bit wrong, we have a little more leeway because we're not going to crash. We're in a cruise phase. We've got some time to react, whereas if Curiosity had failed, it was – That would have been it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty slow process, right? So it's going to happen over the course of several days.

And there's a lot of redundancy built into the different motors and the different mechanisms that are going to release different parts of the telescope for the deployment. In terms of the number of moving parts that need to function for the deployment, it's actually not that dissimilar from Curiosity. They're both in the same ballpark. To be honest, we were very happy that that worked. Yeah, you were pulling for it. You had lots of reasons to be pulling for that. But it definitely demonstrated that NASA can pull off something that complex, especially within the seven-minute terror window.

So that gives us a lot of confidence that we can do what we need to do. Before moving on to what it's actually going to accomplish out there, more detail on that, you've already mentioned we're not going to be able to reach it, no overhauls, no repair missions for this, because it will be where? The premier mountaintop. Sweet spot. So the sweet spot. So there's a gravitational point called the second Lagrange point,

which is located along the sun-Earth-moon line past the moon. And there are other telescopes that we've launched to L2, and they can orbit that point at L2. They'll be going around the Sun once every year, right? So the Earth is 100 million miles from the Sun. James Webb Space Telescope will be 101 million miles from the Sun, right? So it's about a million miles from the Earth, so it'll orbit once a year. And it's a very cold environment.

It's a very quiet environment, much lower radiation from the Earth than the Earth. So it'll orbit once a year. And it's a very cold environment. It's a very quiet environment, much lower radiation from the Earth than the Moon. And so you can get very clear, deep images of the universe. Are you saying the Moon is going to block the reflected heat maybe from Earth or other radiation? The Moon, yeah, the Moon and the Earth and all bodies, even the telescope itself, radiate heat. So the sun shield will always be pointed towards the planetary bodies to make sure that the telescope stays cold. We actually orbit that point. So that means that we're constantly able to have our solar panels pointed at the sun. The earth and the moon won't block that, which is good.

As Jason said, we're way away from noise, not just heat noise from the earth and the moon, but other kinds of noise. And we're away from lower satellites. And Hubble right now, unfortunately, is blocked by the Earth every orbit for 50 minutes or something, whatever it is, 20 minutes. It's also kind of hot. And so Hubble operates at almost this room temperature. We have to be much colder. All of which is critical to the mission of this telescope.

I mean, you have to be super cold. Which is critical to the mission of this telescope. I mean, you have to be super cold. Let's talk about that science that is going to get done with this magnificent instrument. Where do we start? Do we start maybe within our own solar system? We certainly can. One of the things that people might be surprised at is that we're taking a telescope that's three times bigger, roughly, than Hubble,

and we're going to point it at things like Jupiter. And people are, what? Why? And the reason is because of the capabilities we have. There's a lot that you can we're going to point it at things like Jupiter. And people are, what? Why? And the reason is because of the capabilities we have. There's a lot that you can learn by going to Jupiter. You know, Juno's going to go to Jupiter soon. We've got Cassini at Saturn. But one of the things that you can't do necessarily is do long-term monitoring of some things that you might want to do. One of the things that MIRI has is a spectrograph

that will allow us to monitor methane in the clouds of Jupiter, say, over many periods of time, help Cassini follow up some of its mission. We can study comets and asteroids in our own solar system. Asteroids are very interesting for lots of reasons. They might smack us one day, and that would be bad. And so we'd like to know their composition. We also want to know about the Kuiper Belt objects, which are left over from the formation of our solar system.

And that's really exciting. And that's something that we can do. Hubble's just shown recently how powerful those kinds of observations can be because they just discovered yet another satellite, another moon of Pluto. And so that's something that's actually not just important for astronomy, but you've got a spacecraft that's headed there and knowing that there's another moon there that it could hit. And then the other part is that, as you know, when I was in grad school, we only had nine planets and then it became eight. And now we've got over 800. That helps us put our solar system in context. So we need to know what our solar system is all about. But now we can also look at other solar systems and compare them. So one of the missions of James Webb is to not just look at our solar system and its formation and evolution,

but look at the formation and evolution of other solar systems. One of the things that the instrument I work on will be looking at are what we call debris disks or disks around stars. And this is material that's forming planets. Yeah, it's where we all come from. That's exactly where we all came from. How systems go from a gas disk to planets like our own solar system is something that James Webb is going to say a lot about. And then in addition to that, we also have the ability to look at all the planets that are being found by Kepler. So those are planets, you know, that go in front of their parent star. It's like

shining a light bulb through the atmosphere of that planet. I mean, we just did this with Venus in our own solar system. The transit last year. Right. So these are transits. It allows you to analyze the atmosphere of those planets. And one of the exciting things we can do with James Webb for the first time, really, is start to get a detailed analysis of the gases that are in those planets. Comparative planetology, I believe is what the term is. What might we expect? I mean, in the best of all possible worlds, these planets pass over or pass in front of the edge of their home star,

and we get this close-up look at their atmospheres, might you be able to detect things like, oh, let's say oxygen in that atmosphere? Maybe, but what we'll definitely be able to determine is if there's water. And water in the atmosphere of a rocky planet, that gets exciting. Yeah, so the way that this works is that because the wavelength coverage of the James Webb Space Telescope is tuned to the infrared part of the spectrum, there are some deep water bands in the near-infrared part of the spectrum. So when we look at these exoplanets that are going around other stars,

if the signal is strong enough and based on our simulations, we can look at Earth-like planets using this mode, if there's a liquid ocean on that planet and there's a structure to the atmosphere that leads to water vapor in the atmosphere, we can measure that. So obviously water, that would be a really good thing to find, especially a lot of it on one of these rocky, roughly Earth-sized planets. What about things like oxygen? Is that outside of what you might be able to detect in the infrared?

Yeah, so I think the ozone and the oxygen lines are more in the optical and UV part of the spectrum. We're not sure. What we found out with, again, Hubble and Spitzer is that the very thing that we don't know about is what we're going to find. And so some astronomer is going to propose to do just that, and somebody is going to give that astronomer time on James Webb,

and who knows? You know what my boss Bill Nye likes to say is, you know, why are we building this thing? What are we going to learn? We don't know what we're going to learn. That's why we're going out there. And we guarantee that what we're talking about today, which is incredibly exciting science that drives everything that we're going to do, probably the most important discovery that comes out of James Webb will be something that none of us have ever thought about.

And the same is true for Hubble and Spitzer and other telescopes as well. Let me just add one other thing, that in addition to the oxygen and the water that we've been talking about, there are other chemicals like carbon dioxide and methane and things like that that we can see in the infrared part of the spectrum that should be useful. Also, getting back to something that Dean said that I found very interesting is I think there's a real nice synergy between the planetary science probes and the James Webb Space Telescope for a couple of reasons. So one is for a given target that we are going to be sending a planetary science probe to, whether it's a moon of an outer gas giant or one of the planets themselves, as that probe is making detailed studies of the cloud patterns or other properties of those bodies, the JWST can be simultaneously observing that same object, providing a panoramic view and studying global patterns on the body of that object.

And haven't we kind of seen this? I mean, if you go back to Galileo or Jupiter, like when the impacts took place and there were lots of Earth-based instruments backing up what Galileo was able to do, I think Cassini as well. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's exactly what I'm talking about. So there's a proud history of these missions working together and telescopes working together to expand our knowledge about the solar system.

We'll be looking at Mars too, for example. Mars is another good example where we've got orbiters right now. They're good because they're up close and they're very focused. But to get a global view of what's happening, it's sort of like sitting here with you in California. We know what the weather's like, but what's the climate like? So we put both of those together by having James Webb observe while the spacecraft are orbiting the planet. And then the other part of this is that with James Webb, of course, you can look at any object in the solar system that you're not sending a planetary probe to as well, right? You can point this telescope at any Kuiper Belt object, any moon,

any planet in the solar system and study it in detail even if there's no planetary science probe going there. So let's go out farther. And we've talked a little bit about exoplanets, solar systems forming in other parts of the galaxy. But you guys are going to be looking, you and your colleagues, way, way, way beyond our galaxy. Yeah, that's right.

So we actually had a very interesting session here at the American Astronomical Society meeting yesterday called Scientific Opportunities with the James Webb Space Telescope, and I was a chair of that session. We had six presentations at that session from different members of the astronomical community who gave 15-minute presentations on various topics that they're excited about using the telescope for.

And it was all over the place. I mean, the first talk was kind of the deep fields, finding high redshift galaxies and resolving some of the ambiguities that we have from understanding the properties of these first galaxies, which were the seeds of all of the galaxies that we see in the universe today. Which form, perhaps, how long after the Big Bang? That's the question. That's exactly what we hope to answer, right?

That's the question. So did they form 100 million years after or less, 200 million years after? That's what we want to answer. And also how many there are. Are there enough of them to reionize the universe after that early stage? But then right after that, we had an amazing talk by Jessica Liu from Hawaii who talked about using JWST to look at the galactic center, the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, and to establish properties of the supermassive black hole that lives in the center of our galaxy. Jessica's been using some ground-based telescopes to study the motions of

individual stars around the center of the galaxy, and JWST can make huge strides there in constraining what the mass budget is, and that feeds our basic understanding of how galaxies form. Is JWST going to shed some light, again, pardon that way of putting it, on dark energy and dark matter? Yeah, so that's a great question. So the third talk that we had at the Science Opportunities meeting yesterday was given by Tomaso Trejo, actually the fourth talk, Tomaso Trejo, who talked about strong lensing in dark matter. So the way that that works is when you get

concentrations of large galaxies in a small part of space, those galaxies can actually bend space-time. And when they bend space-time, as light from distant objects passes through that part of space, that light gets bent. It has to follow the curvature of space in that location. And so when we look at these cosmic lenses, we see the stretching effect. And that stretching effect, the problem can be inverted. You can use that stretching to learn about the dark matter potential of that cluster. And so this is a technique that we're doing with the Hubble

Space Telescope right now. And it's a technique that will be extended by huge amounts with the James Webb Space Telescope. And following on that, one of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011 was for the acceleration of the universe and that was based on looking at supernova explosions in distant galaxies. Right now we can get pretty far. In the flingo it's a redshift of two or so. But James Webb will let us go much further back in time. And that's really important because we want to characterize that acceleration. Did it happen continuously from the Big Bang?

Did it stop, turn around, go backwards for a year, and then decide that it was really going to accelerate? I mean, who knows? We don't know what to expect. But because of James Webb, as we're doing some of these surveys, like Jason was talking about, we'll also be finding supernovae at those redshifts, at those times in the evolution of our universe.

So that's very exciting. Your best guess, and hopefully your guess will be exceeded by the actual performance, how far back will we be able to see both into the past and distance? So that's an interesting question. I think what we can see is starlight, right? You know, there are some models for the first-generation stars. So the first-generation stars were very massive stars that lacked metals. No heavy elements because nothing had been exploding.

Exactly. Exactly. And there are several hundred solar masses. And what happens is when these stars explode, they create huge supernovae explosions. And the radiation from those supernovae can persist for hundreds of days. So we have models that tell us how bright these stars should be, how long they should persist for, what wavelength their energy should be transmitted in. And a lot of those models suggest fluxes for these stars that can be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope. So I think the answer to your question is that we have a good shot of measuring the explosions of the first stars as well as the first galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope. How far back it can see depends on when those structures formed. And we don't know. So one of the other interesting things is that we know

between the very most distant objects in the universe and sitting here with you today, we have other galaxies. And we know that all those galaxies pretty much, we've never found one that we all know that all those galaxies pretty much, we've never found one that really doesn't show evidence of a black hole in its center. And the interesting thing about that is that even when we look at the very highest redshift, the very youngest galaxies in the universe, they also seem to have a black hole or a quasar. And so these are gigantic black holes that are eating stuff. And because they're eating stuff, they get hot.

And so you can see them all the way across the universe. So even though Jason's right that we might be seeing the very first stars forming at these high redshifts, we know that stars and black holes go hand in hand and that they're tied together in some fundamental way that we've never really understood before. So one of the things that we'll also see are quasars at these very early epochs and understanding the play between, you know, does a quasar need to form before a galaxy forms? Does a galaxy form before a quasar forms?

You know, it's a chicken and egg. And we probably won't figure it out, but we'll certainly have some more important questions about what's going on. We have so much left to learn. Because we're exponentially getting better, the questions get exponentially larger. It's always, you know, whenever we put up new eyes to study the universe in a way that we haven't done before, there are so many new discoveries that are made and so many new questions that arise from those discoveries,

and that work ends up motivating the next generation of missions and projects that you want to build to tackle those new questions. The last thing I want to say about our system is there's also a new change in the way science is done, and I think it's important for your audience as well as all others is it just like Hubble James Webb Space Telescope will be a it's the public's telescope and we get to play with it we get to build it but more and more citizen astronomers are they're looking at cloud sourcing and they're you know people are actually

using the things that we're building you know sitting in their living rooms and that's going to be a even more important in the era of James Webb and that we're building, sitting in their living rooms. And that's going to be even more important in the era of James Webb. And so we're really looking forward to including everybody because it's their telescope. You guys, you cannot wait to get your hands on this data. Yeah, you can tell. So it's actually going to be a competitive process, though. I know, Matt, we were talking about this earlier as well. So how do you actually use the telescope?

You knew where I was going. How do you allocate time on this precious device? It's a great question. So first of all, anybody can apply, right? So if you have an interesting scientific question that you want to address with the James Webb Space Telescope, you can submit a proposal and have that proposal ranked by a committee. And then the top proposals are the ones that will get allocated on the telescope. And this is how, you know, the Hubble Space Telescope works. This is how the Spitzer Space Telescope works, et cetera. It's a level playing field.

It's all peer-reviewed. But it's going to be very competitive. So, you know, on the Hubble Space Telescope right now, roughly one out of every eight proposals or one out of every ten proposals that comes in actually gets time on the telescope. Wow. So it's only the cream of the crop in terms of the science that you're going to do, and we are expecting a similar pressure on the James Webb Space Telescope.

Oh, there's no question. The quality of the science that's getting done on all these telescopes is amazing. And the other piece of that is, going back to my last point, is even though we're allocating time to scientists that are peer-reviewed, all that data gets put in the public domain right away. And so it doesn't just benefit the people that propose for it. But the archive is very important, and astronomers and citizens can mine that archive for all kinds of really exciting things. And some of the stuff that comes out of Spitzer and Hubble, I know I've had several programs where I go back later and somebody's found something that I didn't even know I was going to do. Yeah.

I mean, on Hubble right now, Matt, there's, you know, there's about, I think, 800 papers or so that were published last year based on Hubble Space Telescope data. And almost half of those came from archive observations and then half came from new observations. So the archive is a powerful tool. It's kind of a, it's an astronomical library. You guys have been incredibly generous with your time, especially with so much great science being reported right outside these walls where we're sitting here in the press room at AAS 2013. I want to thank you very much. Wish you, of course, the best of luck on all of our behalves in getting this amazing new instrument out there where it can start doing good for us.

Thank you for inviting us. It's a pleasure. And we look forward to presenting our even more exciting results and news next year. Yeah, thanks a lot, Matt. We really appreciate this and looking forward to talking to you again. Absolutely. I look forward to it as well. Dr. Jason Calleray is a research astronomer and the deputy project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, the JWST, at the Space Telescope Science Institute. His colleague there, one of many, is Dean C. Hines, a scientist at the STSCI, the institute, but also one of the people behind this instrument, this mid-infrared instrument, the MIRI, that

you heard him describe. Dr. Bruce Betts is on the skypline. He's here to tell us what's up in the night sky. And we'll get through some other things too, including a new space trivia contest with a new twist. Welcome. Ooh, a twist. In the meantime, I'll tell you what to look for in the night sky. So there's this, if you define the word line kind of loosely, there's a nice lineup in mid-evening sky. You can, of course, check out in the east, Jupiter, bright Jupiter. And if it's getting a little later in the evening, 9, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, then you can come, well, just about any time,

you can come down a little bit towards the horizon and see reddish Aldebaran. If you come farther down, you'll see the little cluster of stars called the Pleiades. Below that, the well-known Orion's Belt. And then keep following that sort of line down towards the horizon, and you'll find the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. Pre-dawn skies, still got Venus, super bright, but really low in the east. And Saturn, high overhead, looking yellowish. Hard to believe, 2005, it was seven, eight, eight, that's eight years now.

Eight years ago that the Huygens probe landed on Titan. It's 2013, right? Yeah. I remember it as if it was yesterday. And then the following year, 2006, this week, the New Horizons spacecraft launched towards Pluto. Three more years. Two more. It's 2013.

About two and a half. Yeah, I'll adjust. By June, I more. It's 2013. About two and a half. Yeah, I'll adjust. By June, I'll know it's 2013. We move on to Random Space Effect. I can't remember his name, but wasn't that one of Space Ghost's nemeses? Nemesai? Nemesai. I have no idea.

I'm not well-versed in the world of Space Ghost. I'm sorry. Okay, escape velocity. And I mentioned this some before. I kind of dig the concept. Escape velocity, of course, from a planetary body is basically what speed you or your spacecraft would need for an instantaneous push to get you away and still have some velocity left. When, after a little while, you reach infinity. would need for an instantaneous push to get you away and still have some velocity left, when after a little while you reach infinity. But conceptually, it's what it sounds like. It's the speed required to escape a body. But it changes with the radius, the distance from the body.

So usually when we talk about escape body, that would be totally different. Escape velocity from a body, it's at the surface, say, of the Earth or for, I don't know, let's say Jupiter at the approximate top of the atmosphere. But if you go farther out, the escape velocity drops as one over the radius. Ooh, exciting. Ooh, math. But I got to mention, I know I've mentioned this before, but I love the little random space fact that the escape velocity is square root of two times the circular velocity. Space Station is a terrible example because it's huge. But the Space Station orbit, how fast it's going, and you multiply that velocity times square root of two, you get what the escape velocity would be. Not that anyone is planning that.

Not to my knowledge, or not that I can discuss, at least. All right, that was a weird discussion. Let us move on to the trivia contest. I asked you about spacewalks or extravehicular activities, and who was planned to be the third person to have an EVA, a spacewalk, after Alexei Leonov and Ed White did the first two? And why did he not do it? How did we do, Matt?

Very well. And so did Will Middlebrook of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Will, who I think may have only entered for the second time and Random.org chose his answer. It's the minimal answer, but it's quite correct. David Scott. David Scott, apparently on Gemini 8. Is that correct? Yes, but why?

Why? Because of that system, that orbital maneuvering system that kind of went nuts. They got a thruster that got stuck on. Yeah, they got all spinny. Until, I believe, Neil Armstrong figured out how to de-spin it. Our listener Ian Jackson said that it was David Scott's very good fortune to have a certain Mr. Armstrong as the pilot. And that was Neil's very first flight into space. But bottom line, they aborted the mission after that craziness and so therefore aborted having an eva so dave scott not walking in space at that point he did get to walk on the

moon later though so i i think that all worked out who actually did do the third eva of any human being do you know who it was it's another person who walked on the moon matt Matt Kaplan. No, no. I was second. No, I was fourth. I should know. I looked it up while I was doing research for this, and I do not recall. Well, the only reason I know is that we got it from several listeners,

including Kamil Stefaniak in Poland. It was Eugene Cernan, who became later known as the last man to walk on the moon. Cool. All right, we move on to the next trivia contest. And I'm going to come back to escape velocities. I love that thematic thing. Don't you, Matt?

What is the ratio of escape velocities of Jupiter and Earth? So how much higher is the escape velocity for Jupiter compared to Earth? Again, assuming approximate top of Jupiter atmosphere for the Jupiter number and surface of the Earth for the Earth number. What's the approximate ratio between the two? And now tell us of the new system. Yeah, this is the twist, folks. For more than 10 years now, to enter the contest, you, of course, sent us email.

No longer. The way to enter the contest now is through our handy new web page that you'll find at planetary.org slash radio trivia. That's one word, no space. Planetary.org slash radio trivia. And we'll put a link to it on the page where you'll find this show. You can get there from planetary.org slash radio. But just go to slash radio trivia. Fill in the form with

your information. And this is going to make things easier. We think for you folks and for us, the prize once again, this time around will be Bill Nye's voice, the science guy's voice on your answering machine, a personalized message going out to your friends and family from the science guy. That's exciting. It is exciting. That is a twist. That's twisted. That is a twisted sister. I don't think we said.

You have until the 21st. That would be Monday, January 21 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at night sky, and think about your mother's maiden name. Thank you, and good night. Twisted sister, how did you know? He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

Little horse there, he joins us every week here. We're not going to take it. Who? Planet finder Deborah Fisher will join us next week, and in two weeks we'll talk with two radio astronomers about the most powerful telescope ever built. That's ALMA, now up and running on the cold high plains of Chile.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the always questing members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.