A View of the Beginning of Time: An Update

Hey, it’s Michael. All this week, “The Daily” is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year, and learning what’s happened in the time since they first ran. Today we return to an episode hosted by my colleague, Astead Herndon, about the incredible moment when the James Webb telescope, the largest space observatory ever built, sent its first images back to Earth, and hear what it’s discovered since then in its long journey across the universe. It’s Wednesday, December 28.

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So Ken, there was big news in space this week. Can you tell us about these new pictures from NASA that were revealed?

Yeah, we finally got pictures back from the James Webb Space Telescope. This is the biggest, newest telescope that NASA has. So these first photographs from Webb were so amazing that on Monday —

President Biden had a special event to unveil the very first photograph.

And one of the things they saw was a galaxy where it’s so far away that the light took more than 13 billion years to get to us here on Earth.

The universe is 13.8 billion years. So it’s going way back.

And then Tuesday NASA had a separate event to show four other photographs.

And they were just gorgeous. There was an amazing photograph of this stellar nursery. And you could see all these ripples of gas where new stars are being born. You could see another picture of a dying star, another one of five galaxies are in this intricate gravitational dance.

So this is what they call a deep field, which is basically point a telescope at a relatively empty part of the sky and see what’s out there.

It’s amazing is that you realize that the universe, you just look in the sky. It looks like it’s mostly empty. But once you look at it in these new wavelengths of light, you realize there’s exciting structure.

Colors —

Things going on that you never realized until you put a telescope in space to look at them.

It is really kind of like wondrous. What was the scientific reaction to these images?

The scientists kept on saying that they were speechless. One person said that she ugly cried when she saw the first data. Some was joking that all the astronomers in the world have changed their background screens on their computers yesterday.

So these are basically the very first efforts pointing the telescope at the very first few targets, and not even trying very hard yet. This is basically just scratching the surface of what Webb will be able to do in the coming years.

So tell us about the piece of technology that actually took these images. This James Webb Telescope sounds like space’s newest, hottest invention.

That’s exactly what it is. It’s the successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has been taking photographs of the universe for decades now. James Webb is bigger. So that means it can gather much more light and see dimmer objects much farther away, to almost the Big Bang. It’s looking back to when the first stars and the first galaxies formed. And this is probably within 1/2 billion years after the Big Bang, the very start of the universe.

You know, I don’t want to say the words time travel, but it feels the closest to time travel we have.

Astronomy really is time travel, because light takes time to reach us. The farther anything is, the longer it takes light to get to us. So when we look at the farthest things, we are looking back in time.

OK, Ken, so let’s go back in time. Tell us how this telescope came to be and how it became this defining moment for NASA.

Back in 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope, which has produced these amazing pictures of the universe that almost everyone has seen. And it’s a resounding success now. But when it launched, it was a huge embarrassment for NASA.

In what way?

Well, once they started getting the first images back, all the images were blurry. And they started tweaking. Maybe they thought they needed to adjust something. But no matter what they did, the images were still blurry. And after enough investigation they discovered that the mirror had been ground to the wrong shape.

And it was only by a tiny little bit. The mirror is eight feet wide. And the edges were two microns too shallow.

I wish I knew what a micron meant to fully understand that sentence.

Sure, a piece of paper is 100 microns thick.

Oh, OK. This is even crazier than I expected. So a piece of paper is 100 microns thick. And you said this mirror was 2 microns too shallow.

Yes, over something that’s eight feet wide.

Wow, and that made such a huge impact in Hubble?

Yes, it looked like the billions of dollars that they spent on Hubble was a complete failure. And that was very embarrassing for NASA at the time. And it took several years for NASA to come up with a fix.

And so in 1993 the space shuttle went up to Hubble in orbit around Earth. And the astronauts actually installed this new equipment. And after that all the images from Hubble were clear again. And everything that people were hoping for from Hubble then succeeded.

OK.

And with Hubble, NASA could send astronauts with the space shuttle to fix the problems. There is no such luxury with Webb. Because Webb was bigger and because of its design it had to be at super cold temperatures, which meant they had to put it at this point in space that’s a million miles from Earth.

So everything that was on Webb had to work the first time. There was not going to be a chance to try it again. And that means you have to check everything and check again. And testing to make sure everything works one time correctly, it takes a lot of time. And it takes a lot of money. And that’s where the Webb project kept on running into problems over the years.

Mhm.

So when NASA gave the green light to this space telescope in the mid 1990s, they thought it would cost $1.5 billion, maybe a little bit more than that. And they thought it would be ready for launch by 2007. They underestimated just how hard it was and just how many things they had to invent along the way.

Like what?

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There were some major design challenges they had to solve. The first is that this mirror is huge. Hubble’s telescope was eight feet. Webb’s telescope is 21 feet. It’s as big as a two story building.

So the other problem that they had was that everything had to be really cold, because even just the slightest bit of heat would blur the images.

And why is that?

So the James Webb Telescope is designed to look at infrared light. Because the universe is expanding, the furthest objects they’re like shifted to the longer wavelengths. And in order to see them, you have to look in the infrared, the part of the spectrum that is redder than red.

And more importantly, infrared light is easily distorted if there’s any sources of heat around it. And that’s what led to a decision to put the telescope a million miles from Earth. So none of the heat from the Earth’s atmosphere can affect the Webb telescope because it’s so far away.

The other thing they had to do is make sure that it stayed cold. It had to be about minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wow.

And to get it that cold they had to build a sun shield, which is this big piece of fabric that’s the size of a tennis court that’s blocking sunlight, and keeping anything from warming up the telescope. So how do you fit something that’s a two story high mirror, a tennis court sized sun shield, and pack it in a rocket? Because there’s no rockets that big.

And so they had to do something that was almost like origami. They broke the mirror apart into little smaller hexagons that stacked on each other. They had to fold up the sun shield, and pack that all into a rocket, and design it so that once it’s in space that it would unfold and move into place perfectly the first time. So you can kind of see why it turned out to be a little bit harder than NASA thought at first.

I mean, yeah, yeah.

So originally, they thought they could get this done by 2007. And every time that you would look at the project they were like, oh, the launch day is now pushed back to 2010. The price tag is now $3 billion. And things were so bad that in 2011 they had basically a hard reset.

And at that point they said, we are now aiming for 2018. And we’re going to say that this is going to cost no more than $8 billion, which is huge, because again, they thought it was $1 billion and change when they started.

And it’s hard to overstate how important this was for NASA. This was the signature program that was going to define NASA for decades to come. And now NASA had to go back to Congress saying, oops, we can’t get this done on time. And we’re going to have to ask for another few billion dollars from you.

So with all these problems, and the rising price tag, there was grumblings in Congress that maybe we should just cut our losses and cancel Webb. But in the end, Congress decided not to cancel Webb. It gave NASA the additional money. The project started moving forward again. And that brings us to launch on Christmas Day, 2021.

Webb is on this Ariane 5 rocket. It’s a European rocket. The launch pad is in French Guiana in South America. It’s actually a good place to launch, because it’s closer to the equator.

Oh.

So when you’re trying to get to space, if you’re close to the equator, you can take advantage of the rotation of the Earth to add velocity to your rocket.

Oh, I will remember that next time I’m going to space.

So first thing in the morning there are literally astronomers around the world watching the live stream of this rocket. And they’re all completely nervous.

This is something that they’ve been thinking about, dreaming about since the ‘90s. And they’re worried that there might have been some oversight, like the Hubble mirror not being quite right, that something would go wrong that they could not fix because this was a million miles away.

And then —

The launch was perfect.

And for most space missions, once a spacecraft reaches orbit you usually get this big sigh of relief because you feel like everything else is not going to be as complex. But this wasn’t true for Webb. The hard part was its mirror had to undock itself and snap into its final configuration. The sun shield had to unfold and deploy. And NASA had identified 344 what they called single point failures. So if something didn’t snap into place, there was no backup system.

And all 344 things, they all worked. It got to its final destination at the end of January. The instruments turned on. Almost everything worked as well as NASA could have possibly hoped. And all this preparation, all this calibration, all this testing, it all paid off. And by June, they were ready to start taking their first scientific measurements. And so far Webb seems to be working better than promised.

The microns were on.

Yeah, I’m sure whoever was in charge of the mirrors made sure they checked every measurement 20 times.

We’ll be right back.

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So Ken, as you told us, the James Webb is already starting to show us things that we’ve never seen before. What else do we expect for it to show us? Spaceplain to me.

So again, what makes Webb special is that its mirror is so much bigger than Hubble’s. And it’s looking at this new part of the spectrum of light, the infrared, to look at the universe. And because it’s looking at the infrared, they can see details that they couldn’t see before. That’s why this image is so much more colorful, so much more detailed than what Hubble could do.

And another major thing that they’re planning to do with Webb is to start looking at and examining planets around other stars, what we call exoplanets.

OK. Exoplanets, planets around other stars. Got it.

So back in the early ‘90s we had yet to see a single planet around another star. Everyone assumed like there’s billions of stars. There must be planets around many, if not most of them. But no one had actually identified any. And it wasn’t until 1994 where people started discovering them.

And now we now there are thousands of them. What Webb can do, Webb is great, but it actually can’t see individual planets. But it can do this amazing analysis of a planet.

And this is kind of a trick. Because for certain planets they occasionally pass in front of a star. So basically you just have a little black dot. What happens is that the atmosphere of the planet blocks certain colors of the starlight. So you can actually compare the colors of the starlight by itself versus what colors you see when there’s a tiny planet in front of it. And there’s going to be slight differences, because different molecules, they will block slightly different colors from the starlight

And from that, you can actually identify what the atmosphere of that planet can be. So a planet that’s about the size of Earth, it passes in front of stars, we can start seeing is the oxygen in there? Is there water? Is there things that perhaps are evidence of life on that planet?

So basically what this telescope does is not look at the exoplanets directly, but analyze the atmosphere around the planet, which can then basically see if there are things that could point to potential signs of life?

Yeah, so we now there are these star systems. And some of them are pretty close where there’s planets. In fact, there’s one called TRAPPIST 1. It’s about 40 light years away, so not far at all. And it has seven Earth sized planets in orbit around it.

It’s a pretty small star. So the planets are actually pretty close to the star. And three of them are in what is known as the habitable zone. That’s where it’s not too cold or not too hot. And if it’s not too hot, not too cold, maybe there’s liquid water on it. If there’s liquid water —

Ah, using process of elimination, OK.

We don’t know any of this information now. We just know it looks like it’s about the size of Earth. But we don’t know anything about the properties of the atmosphere or what’s on the planet. And with Webb we can actually start exploring, not just TRAPPIST 1, but start looking across all these many stars, and all the planets around these stars, and start getting a sense of what is the range of planets that exists in our galaxy? How different are they from Earth? How common is something like Earth?

Wow, so it is not far fetched to say that this telescope is the furthest we have gotten in terms of having a tool that can understand whether there is potential life on another planet.

I mean, in terms of something like microbes living on a planet, this is the tool that will start giving us hints about that question.

So how long do we expect the James Webb to be doing this kind of work?

The original lifetime was they were aiming for 10 years. Because the launch went so perfectly, they didn’t have to use very much propellant for getting the trajectory corrected as it went out to its final destination. They now say they have enough propellant to last at least 20 years.

Wow.

Now, of course, things in space, you never know what’s out there. There’s rocks just whizzing back and forth in the solar system. And if one of them hits the telescope in the wrong spot it could just knock it out of operation tomorrow.

I mean, it actually has already been hit by one micrometeoroid that damaged one of the mirrors already.

Already?

Yeah, it happened a couple months ago. They sort of anticipated it. It was a little bit bigger than what they were expecting. But they have ways to adjust for that. And they say it’s still operating — meeting all of its specifications.

Actually, they were actually hoping by measuring how many times it gets hit by different things a better understanding of how much stuff there is in the solar system. So even by being damaged —

We even learn things when it gets hit.

Yeah, so by being damaged NASA learns more about the solar system.

If only I learned from damage too.

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So we’ve now seen this extraordinary scientific success from NASA, this telescope that is unique, launching to universal acclaim and excitement. But as you said on the show before, it comes at a time in which it’s been private companies, and specifically billionaires who have been making the most hay in terms of space travel in recent years, not NASA.

I’m thinking about SpaceX and Elon Musk’s travel. I’m thinking about Jeff Bezos in his brief space flight. How do we see James Webb and NASA’s latest initiative in relationship with how these billionaires and how these private corporations have, frankly, changed our understanding of space travel?

So the billionaires are changing NASA. And I would say, in many ways, that’s a good thing in that it’s more people going to space than have ever gone to space before. That’s the human spaceflight part of NASA.

Mhm.

With Webb, this is the other side of NASA, the space part. These are the things that NASA does that Elon Musk is never going to do.

Mm, mhm. This is science. This is space science.

This is space science. These are asking the fundamental questions that we all think about when we’re up late at night and can’t sleep. Are we alone? Why is there a universe at all? These are questions that, you know, you can argue that this has no practical effect on your everyday life. But those are the things that make people special, that we are curious. We wonder what’s beyond the next hill. We want to see what’s beyond the next star.

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And it’s just like centuries ago people were exploring the oceans, exploring the new continents. NASA’s exploring the solar system and the universe in ways that is very much in the adventure vein that people have always done.

Well, I, for one, am deeply excited. Thank you, Ken, for teaching me, and spicing up my week.

It’s good talking with you.

After the break, Ken shares an update on what Webb has captured during its time in orbit.

We’ll be right back.

So this Christmas marks the one year anniversary of the launch of Webb. It’s been one year since NASA put this newest and most powerful telescope into space. And Webb has continued to take amazing images better than almost anyone could have imagined. It can capture up to 57 gigabytes of data per day. And as it’s peered through every corner of the universe, it’s allowed us to see some pretty amazing things.

So one of the main parts of Webb’s mission is to look at exoplanets. That is planets around other stars. And a few months ago Webb captured its first image of an exoplanet. It orbits a star 385 light years from Earth in a constellation called Centaurus. Because it’s a giant ball of gas, and because it’s so far from its star this particular exoplanet won’t have life. But it’s the first step to studying these planets.

Perhaps the most striking Webb image that we’ve seen so far has been the Pillars of Creation. A lot of people probably remember the one that Hubble took years ago. It’s these giant columns of gas in the Eagle Nebula, which is in the Milky Way. And it’s a place where stars are born. They almost look like the fingers of the hand of God reaching across the universe.

Webb also took a picture of the Pillars’ creation. And that image is even more vivid and even more vibrant than what Hubble saw. That’s because Webb is looking at these longer wavelengths of light that are able to pierce the clouds of dust that blocked the light from Hubble. And because of this, astronomers can now see details and structures that were previously invisible to them. That could be filaments of dust or gas, or even stars.

Webb has also found galaxies that until now were too far away and too dim to see. One of them is thought to have formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang. And while 350 million years sounds like a really long time, the universe is almost 14 billion years old. So in the grand scheme of things, these galaxies were among the first to light up the universe.

If we think about the arc of space imagery, it’s kind of like the history of television, like how in the old days we had the equivalent of cathode ray TVs. And then Hubble came along. It was like we finally got HD.

And now, with Webb, we’ve got 4K. We’ve got Dolby Vision. We’ve got everything. Everything scientists hope to be seeing, they are now seeing with Webb. And this is just the beginning.

Today’s episode was hosted by Astead Herndon, in conversation with science reporter Kenneth Cheung. It was produced by Sydney Harbor, Michael Simon Johnson, Nina Feldman, Asthaa Chaturvedi, and Rikki Novetsky, and was edited by Michael Benoist, Patricia Willans, and Anita Badejo, with help from Liz Baylen. It contains original music by Marion Lozano and Elisheba Ittoop, and was engineered by Chris Wood and Corey Schreppel. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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