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So one of the wonderful challenges about astronomy is that is that we have to imagine

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something so we can go look for it.

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But nature has a way of being even more creative than we are; so

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we have always been surprised by what we see in the sky. That's

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why building a telescope has always been interesting. Every time we build a

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better one, we see something we never imagined was out there. That's been going on for

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centuries. This is the next step in that great series,

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of bigger and better and more powerful telescope that surely will surprise us in some way that I

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can't tell you. The James Webb Space Telescope at its core is designed

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to answer some of the biggest questions we have in astronomy today. And these are questions

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that go beyond just being science questions; they are questions that really get to the heart of

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who we are as human beings; questions like where do we come from?

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How did we get here? And of course the big one, are we alone?

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To answer the biggest questions in

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astronomy today we really need a very big telescope. And the James Webb Space Telescope

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is the biggest telescope we’ve ever attempted to send into space. It really sets

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us up with some really big engineering challenges.

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It had never been done before, to build a big unfolding telescope in space. Because we knew we needed something

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that was bigger than the rocket to achieve the scientific discoveries that we wanted to make.

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We had to invent a new way to make the mirrors, a way to

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focus it out in outer space, several new kinds of infrared detectors, we had

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to invent the big unfolding umbrella we call it the sunshield. Webb has

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four broad s science goals. To detect the very first stars and galaxies that

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were born in the very early universe. So this is a part of the universe

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that we haven’t seen at all yet, we don’t know what’s there so the telescope in a

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sense is going to open up this brand new part of the universe the part of the universe that got

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everything started. To search for the first galaxies that were

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born after the Big Bang. The first stars and galaxies are really

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the big mystery for us. We don't know how that happened, we don't know when it happened

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we don't know what those stars were like. We have a pretty good idea that they were very much

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larger than the sun and that they would burn out in a tremendous burst of glory in just a

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few million years. To watch how galaxies grow and change

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over time. We have questions like how galaxies

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merge, how black holes form and how gas inflows

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and outflows affect galaxy evolution. But we're really missing

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a key piece of the puzzle, which is how galaxies got their start.

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To find stars and planets inside dusty clouds

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and to help in our search for life in the Universe.

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So astronomy is one of the most observationally

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based sciences we've ever had. Everything we know about the sky has been a surprise.

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The ancients knew about the stars, but they didn't know they were far away.

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They didn't know they were like the sun. Eventually we found that our own galaxy

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is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies and that the Universe is very old

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but not infinitely old. So that was a big surprise too.

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Einstein through, of course the Universe must have an infinite age, without a starting point

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well he was wrong. So our intuition has been wrong almost all

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the time. We’re pretty confident that we don't know what we're going to find.

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As an astronomer one of the most exciting things about

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working on a telescope like this is the prospect of what it will tell us that we haven't

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even thought of yet. We have all these really detailed science questions that

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ask, that we know to ask and that we'll answer. And in a sense

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that is what science is all about, in answering the questions we come up with more questions.

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So there's this almost infinite supply of questions, of things

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that we have to learn. So that's why NASA builds telescopes

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is really to get to this fundamental part of who we are as human beings.

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We're explorers and we want to learn, learn about what our Universe is like.

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