We could hear from a NASA Administrator or a Chief Scientist about
the James Webb Space Telescope, but I think it comes better from a young person.
Anyone excited about the possibilities of space Astronomy will recognize that
James Webb is an extraordinary mission.
>> Here are the top five reasons why the James Webb Space Telescope.
Freaking kicks ass.
It is huge.
The total mirror size is seven and
half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's Mirror.
The heatshield is the size of a tennis court.
Number four, it is a freaking transformer.
So in order to fit into the rocket, it's super duper folded up.
And when it arrives it unfolds in like 12,000 different marvelous little ways.
That could go wrong in any moment, and it freaks me out because I worry about that.
Number three, it will operate 1 million miles from Earth.
That's about four times as far away from the Earth as the Moon is.
The Webb Telescope actually orbits the sun.
That's the simplification.
It's actually in the relative stationary of Sun-Earth to Lagrange point two.
Which I'm not going to try to explain to you right now.
If it screws up, there's no way to fix it.
One chance to do it right or it's a $6 billion piece of space junk.
That is tense.
Number two, it will be able to see planets orbiting stars in our galaxy.
Individual planets.
If the James Webb Space Telescope was 25 light-years away.
It could see the Earth.
They can also determine the chemical composition of planets, and
it can peer into stellar nurseries, to see planets as they form.
And finally, the James Webb Space Telescope can see 13.4 billion years
into the past.
We will be seeing the first galaxies as they form, the first stars as they form.
And guess what, none of this is necessary to life on Earth.
None of it's going to help us cure malaria and install a democracy in Egypt, but
it is awesome in the truest sense of the word awesome.
I'm sorry that there's so
many hand gestures in this video, [LAUGH] I'm feeling very gesture.
This is the dawn of everything that we know, and
that is increasing awesome, and that is something that I can get behind.
>> The James Webb Space Telescope will cover all of
Astronomy working on topics from planets to cosmology.
But it'll or may have a particular impact on two fields.
One is the study of distant galaxies.
Perhaps the primary focus of James Webb is going to be detecting first light in
the Universe.
This is a time, somewhat over 13 billion years ago, when the very first stars and
galaxies lit up in the Universe, which was cooling from a thin, diffused and
almost uniform gas.
This is impossible to observe with the Hubble Space Telescope.
It simply doesn't have enough light-gathering power, and
it works primarily in the visible range, not in the near infrared.
James Webb will also do work on characterizing exoplanets.
Exoplanets had not even been discovered when the James Webb was
first conceived of.
So this is new Science for that telescope.
But it will be able to do spectra of exoplanets to try and look for biomarkers.
That is the chemical signatures of life on a distant planet.
A very exciting project that is nonetheless extremely challenging even for
this large telescope.
James Webb is long overdue and over-budget and the price tag has caused some stress
to the astronomical community, as well as to NASA which manages this large project.
But James Webb has an almost firm launch date, somewhere around the end of 2016 or
early 2017, it's passed all of it technical hurdles and
astronomers are starting to anticipate it with pleasure.
That's big glass in space, what about on the ground?
We've seen examples of big telescopes that are being prepared at the University of
Arizona using our mirrors.
The largest single-dish at the moment is actually a non-steerable optical
telescope called the Grand Canary Telescope,
build by the Spanish in partnership with other organizations.
It's on the Canary Islands where there's a major observatory, and
this mirror can only stare at one strip of sky that passes overhead.
That allows the mirror and the telescope to be quite cheap.
Because no large structure is needed to steer around the sky.
[MUSIC] The next very large telescope to be
commissioned we hope will be the Giant Magellan Telescope.
A partnership between the University of Arizona and the Smithsonian Organization
and a set of private and public universities in the United States.
This telescope should be commissioned sometime late this decade.
It's going to be built on Alaskan Palace Observatory site where we
already have a pair of six and a half a meter telescopes.
This visualization of the structure shows the size and complexity and also
the ability to grasp light from across the Universe of this wonderful facility.
[MUSIC]