So one of the wonderful challenges about astronomy is that is that we have to imagine
something so we can go look for it.
But nature has a way of being even more creative than we are; so
we have always been surprised by what we see in the sky. That's
why building a telescope has always been interesting. Every time we build a
better one, we see something we never imagined was out there. That's been going on for
centuries. This is the next step in that great series,
of bigger and better and more powerful telescope that surely will surprise us in some way that I
can't tell you. The James Webb Space Telescope at its core is designed
to answer some of the biggest questions we have in astronomy today. And these are questions
that go beyond just being science questions; they are questions that really get to the heart of
who we are as human beings; questions like where do we come from?
How did we get here? And of course the big one, are we alone?
To answer the biggest questions in
astronomy today we really need a very big telescope. And the James Webb Space Telescope
is the biggest telescope we’ve ever attempted to send into space. It really sets
us up with some really big engineering challenges.
It had never been done before, to build a big unfolding telescope in space. Because we knew we needed something
that was bigger than the rocket to achieve the scientific discoveries that we wanted to make.
We had to invent a new way to make the mirrors, a way to
focus it out in outer space, several new kinds of infrared detectors, we had
to invent the big unfolding umbrella we call it the sunshield. Webb has
four broad s science goals. To detect the very first stars and galaxies that
were born in the very early universe. So this is a part of the universe
that we haven’t seen at all yet, we don’t know what’s there so the telescope in a
sense is going to open up this brand new part of the universe the part of the universe that got
everything started. To search for the first galaxies that were
born after the Big Bang. The first stars and galaxies are really
the big mystery for us. We don't know how that happened, we don't know when it happened
we don't know what those stars were like. We have a pretty good idea that they were very much
larger than the sun and that they would burn out in a tremendous burst of glory in just a
few million years. To watch how galaxies grow and change
over time. We have questions like how galaxies
merge, how black holes form and how gas inflows
and outflows affect galaxy evolution. But we're really missing
a key piece of the puzzle, which is how galaxies got their start.
To find stars and planets inside dusty clouds
and to help in our search for life in the Universe.
So astronomy is one of the most observationally
based sciences we've ever had. Everything we know about the sky has been a surprise.
The ancients knew about the stars, but they didn't know they were far away.
They didn't know they were like the sun. Eventually we found that our own galaxy
is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies and that the Universe is very old
but not infinitely old. So that was a big surprise too.
Einstein through, of course the Universe must have an infinite age, without a starting point
well he was wrong. So our intuition has been wrong almost all
the time. We’re pretty confident that we don't know what we're going to find.
As an astronomer one of the most exciting things about
working on a telescope like this is the prospect of what it will tell us that we haven't
even thought of yet. We have all these really detailed science questions that
ask, that we know to ask and that we'll answer. And in a sense
that is what science is all about, in answering the questions we come up with more questions.
So there's this almost infinite supply of questions, of things
that we have to learn. So that's why NASA builds telescopes
is really to get to this fundamental part of who we are as human beings.
We're explorers and we want to learn, learn about what our Universe is like.
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