Hello and welcome to this press
briefing on the James Webb Space Telescope.
I'm Karen Fox.
With NASA's Office of Communications.
And we are here today
at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,
to talk about the latest update on the Webb Telescope,
which is all about aligning the mirrors.
We will be taking Q&A from the media on the line.
After some talks
today, you can get in the queue by dialing Star One.
We are also taking social media questions.
Just post your question using the hashtag unfold the universe
and we'll be taking some of those along the way as well.
We are going to start out with Thomas Zurbuchen,
the associate administrator for science at NASA headquarters
in Washington, D.C.. Welcome.
So glad to be here.
What a day can It's exciting.
Tell us why we're here.
Well, look,
this is one of the most magnificent days
in my whole career right now.
So frankly, and for many of us astronomers
one of the most important days that we've had.
Because even though there's still weeks and months
ahead to really fully unleash the power
of this new observatories orbiter at L2,
today we can announce that the optics
will perform to specifications or even better.
It's an amazing achievement.
Fantastic.
Tell us a little more about how we got here.
What brought us to this day?
This has been a journey for over two decades.
And I go and look at this team.
They're sitting there right now, and each and every
one of them is so important from different organizations
from Goddard Space Telescope, Northrop Grumman Ball, which
spend work on this, and other contractors,
other participants from all around.
But for everyone who sits there, there's tens, hundreds
that have contributed to this from the idea stage
20 plus two years ago with ten plus
new technologies that had to be invented
coming up with this fragmented mirror 21 feet across
18 pieces at the flatness not conceived before
and now putting it together
to get to this place of course launching from Kourou
together with our international partners,
deploying it seamlessly in space and now
aligning that optics it's great.
I've heard you talk a lot about this team
and your admiration for this team.
And my understanding is this is really the first time
we have ever done this where we've had to hold a mirror
and put it up into the fairing before launch.
And to talk me through that a little bit.
What? What?
How much had to be conceived and brought to where we are?
Look, I mean, when we have a mission, normally
elsewhere in our portfolio, we think of like one or two.
I call them miracles, you know, kind of new ideas, entirely new
technologies that when we start, we don't know yet
whether they're going to work this telescope.
This observatory now had ten of them,
perhaps even 12, depending on how you count.
And you should know that the ingenuity of the entire team,
you know, the diverse team that came together the best
that they offer from the international community
got us here.
You know, for me, when I think about this, frankly,
I've said it before, I'm saying it again.
I think of that in amazing
challenge, really at the edge of what's possible.
And they did it in a way that, frankly,
to outside observers make it look easy.
And what people should see is not that it's easy.
It will be far from the truth.
I've lost sleepless nights, awkwardness,
this particular step, but also outer step
that this team put behind them in a fashion.
What you should see
is just the amazing quality of a team coming together,
United behind a purpose and, you know, desire
to see the universe in ways we've never seen before.
So what's next?
Well, so this team is going forward.
It's doing the entire optics alignment
continuing and finalizing it.
And then, of course, it's all about instruments.
Now we need to turn on these instruments
and all the modes that are there, kind of
somewhere in the summer, June-July, perhaps.
You know, we're going to have kind of these modes there.
We're going to be ready to really show that the universe
that we've not
seen in that infrared universe at that resolution.
And then, frankly,
what we're most excited about is turning it over
to the science community to let that discovery
begin at a level we've never seen before.
Thank you so much.
We really appreciate it. Thank you.
We are going to keep Thomas here.
He'll be here for the question and answer portion.
But for now, we are moving on to the rest of the panel.
We have a great panel here. For you today.
We have Eileen Fineberg, who is the Webb Optical
Telescope Element Manager here at NASA Goddard.
We have Aaron Wolfe, who is the Web program manager
at Ball Aerospace in Broomfield, Colorado.
Marshall Perron, the deputy telescope scientist
at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Maryland.
And Jane Rigby, who is the Web Operations
Project Scientist also here at NASA Goddard.
We're going to start off with Lee.
He's going to tell us a little bit more about this alignment.
Thank you, Karen.
Well, we have now
finished the fourth and fifth phases
of the telescope alignment.
We call those phases course phasing in fine phasing.
And that's where we've made the primary mirror
all 18 mirror segments into a single primary mirror.
And we will initially align the telescope
to the near cam instrument.
That's the instrument that we use to do the alignment.
And and we've taken our first images.
In fact,
the team gathered over the weekend
when the first images came down.
We were in the mission control center.
And it was a very emotional moment.
We kind of blew this some of the images of stars up
and really could see how it was performing.
And I'm happy to say that the optical performance
of the telescope is absolutely phenomenal.
It is really working extremely well.
And and we said last fall that we would know
that the telescope is working properly
when we have an image of a star that looks like a star.
And and now we have that.
And you're seeing that image
This is actually a 2100 second exposure
taken at roughly two microns, which is the wavelength
which Webb was designed to work at or above
and you not only see the star and the spikes
from the
diffraction of the star, but you see
other stars in the field that are tightly focused,
just like we expect and all sorts of other
interesting structure in the background.
We've actually done
very detailed analysis of the images we're getting.
And so far, what we're finding is that the performance is
as good, if not better, than our most optimistic predictions.
So we're really pleased with that.
And to give you some perspective of what has happened
and sort of how the telescope got here,
we want to run this video clip to kind of show you
what the telescope has been through to get to this point.
Webb's science
objectives required a large primary mirror,
a mirror too large to fit inside the largest rocket
fairing that exists.
So we had to design Webb's optics to be folded
This meant Webb's Mirror segments
had to be extremely lightweight
and individually controllable
so they could be aligned in space.
We put everything through rigorous testing to ensure
Webb's delicate systems would survive, launch
and work in the super cold vacuum of space.
Webb's cryogenic test inside Chamber A at the Johnson
Space Center in Houston in 20, 17, five years ago
was actually the last time we tested the telescope
or took images with the near Kim instrument,
which is used to align the mirrors
at Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles.
Webb's optical segment was integrated
with the spacecraft
and Sunshield segment, and we did more testing.
One thing we can't directly test on Earth
is the effect of zero-G on the system.
We use computer models.
These models give us confidence it would work in the zero
gravity environment, a space
We packed Webb and shipped it out from Los Angeles to the
Panama Canal to the Gardner Space Center in French Guiana.
There, Webb was placed atop the Ariane five rocket
and launched into space on December 25th.
And. The collection deck or large lift off
from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself.
James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth
of the universe.
Punching a hole through the clouds.
This is the first time the Webb Observatory was exposed
to the vacuum of space.
The heat of the sun and zero gravity.
Moments after launch, the solar panel
deployed
for the next several weeks.
The Space
Telescope Science Institute team unfolded about 50 parts,
including the sunshield and the mirrors.
The open sunshield helped cool down the instruments,
a mirror to about -400 degrees Fahrenheit.
One of Webb's final deployments was releasing
the Mirror segments from their launch locks.
Then we could start the Mirror alignment process
for the next six weeks, the optics team
worked to perfectly aligned Webb's mirrors.
We had to engineer the telescope and mirrors
to survive all of this and meet demanding optical requirements
So this achievement was not an accident.
It took a lot of hard work and just a total commitment
to excellence by a number of teams over.
For over 20 years, I've been fortunate
enough to work with teams
from Northrop Grumman Ball Aerospace L-3 Harris.
Four different NASA's centers contributed to this,
as well as ESCO Space Telescope and many other companies,
as well as our collaborations with European Space Agency
and the Canadian Space Agency and all the interfaces
and all the aspects of the telescope.
And with all that hard work and dedication, we can now
say it was worth it, that the telescope itself is working.
We still have work to go
to bring on
the rest of the observatory, the rest of the instruments,
finish the alignment of the telescope
to the other instruments
but the optical performance is working,
and we're getting very close to the point that we can turn this
amazing scientific tool over to the astronomical community
and kind of want to leave with the thought that not only have
we built this amazing
scientific capability for this generation,
but we've sort of pioneered a new way to build
large space telescopes which we can give
to the next generation of future generations.
Thank you so much, Lee.
We are now moving on to Aaron Wolfe
who is the Web program manager at Ball Aerospace.
She's going to give us some details about the engineering
that made all of this alignment happen.
We're seeing
the payoff of years of technology development,
the optical hardware that we spent years manufacturing
and polishing and measuring down to the tens of nanometers
is working better than our most optimistic predicts.
It's very exciting.
We also spent a lot of time developing the algorithms
and the mathematical processes
that we would need to perform this alignment in space.
We've never had a segmented telescope in space before,
so we had to invent a whole new process.
So we built a 16 scale model of a testbed telescope
in Colorado to prove out all of those
algorithms and run through the process
that dictates how what our
moves will be on the motors
And it's
actually been easier in space than it was in the lab.
So we used the motors on the back of the mirrors
to make small adjustments to the mirror positions
And we also have that center radius of curvature actuated
that can actually change
the curvature and shape of each individual segment
as we align and tip and tilt and piston through focus
and move them all around.
And the goal here
is to get all 18 segments to work together as one.
One big, monolithic primary mirror
And you can really see the progression of this process
through our pupil images.
So a couple of weeks ago, we took this pupil image
and you can see one segments
really lit up brightly with some starlight coming in.
But now we have a new pupil image with all 18 segments
just lit up and it looks wonderful.
So we're really excited.
So far, the process is working
and the hardware is performing better than requirements.
We couldn't be happier and it's just a testament
like Thomas and Lee have said to all of the years and years
of hard work that everyone has put in, people that haven't.
Not necessarily on the team now for the commissioning,
but they did the technology development decades ago.
The integration for many, many years.
So it's really an honor to bring Webber
through this process
now at the end and work on all of that
amazing technology development that the team did back then.
Thank you to Aaron.
We are now going to move to Marshall Perron with the Space
Telescope Science Institute is going to give us more details
about the alignment
Thanks.
So the alignment process began after the initial deployments
of Webb
back in the first few weeks of this year
and those large unfolding motions that got the mirrors out
to about within a millimeter or so of their desired locations.
But in order to have the mirrors all actors as one, they need
to be lined up to just within a few nanometers of one another.
That ends up being it's a few hundred atomic diameters,
the level of precision that we need here.
So to do that,
we step through a long process.
The team has been preparing and practicing for many, many years
in which we begin by finding the 18 spots of light,
that one from each of the mirrors.
And we gather those together.
We begin by aligning them all
as if they were separate telescopes.
We have 18 telescopes basically at this point.
We're going to focus in align each of those telescopes
one by one, using deep focused images to work out
the misalignments of the mirrors and bring them to the point
that each of these 18 telescopes are sharp on their own.
Once we do that, we begin to stack together.
The spots of light
in this we call image stacking produces
something that has the light gathering power
of the full telescope, but not yet the sharpness.
We still have the mirrors misaligned
by some hundreds of microns at this point in the process.
And we need to refine that alignment
through a series of additional measurement steps and measure.
Correct. Measure, correct.
We use several different measurement techniques.
We move the pattern of spots around the different parts
of the telescope
in order to measure the secondary mirror
alignment between the center in the corners
of the field of view.
We use a prism to split the light
from pairs of segments and measure the piston offsets.
We can then correct those piston offsets
to bring the mirrors in interphase with one another.
And at the end of the process we use a set of the focused
images that we take using lenses we put in the beam.
This is sort of like being at the eye doctor
and you test different lenses and see how
they work And here we're using computer
and mathematical analysis to use those defocus images
to measure the mirror positions with the precision
of just nanometers.
And we use that to dial in these these very fine adjustments
that bring the telescope into it.
Just an exquisite sharpness.
This is a process that we've prepared
and practiced for years
and and
we've rehearsed over the last few years,
and now we've had a chance to run that plan.
And it's just an absolute thrill to be able to say
that everything worked.
And the telescope, at no point in that process
did we have any significant
technical issues with the telescope.
Everything's performing at or above the expectations.
As we said,
there were a couple of places
with some surprises in the data, but little surprises.
The biggest one, honestly, has been
just how closely it matched the models and the predictions
from the ground.
It has been far closer to those predictions than than
a lot of us had dared to hope.
And we now have achieved what's called diffraction
limited alignment of the telescope.
The images are focused together
as finely as the laws of physics allow.
This is a sharpened
image as you can get from a telescope of this size.
And as we were focusing the telescope,
we were using typically one or Bright Star at a time,
a handful of different stars we used on the sky.
But as we were focusing on those bright stars, we couldn't help
but see the rest of the universe coming into focus behind them
to see the more distant stars and galaxies coming into view.
And honestly, the team was giddy at times
just seeing this happen.
There's no way to look at these data
and not be excited at the scientific possibilities
that are opening up here.
We've done this over the last several months.
Within almost exactly on schedule.
There is a few things
that took a little bit longer than we thought.
There are some steps that went faster than we thought.
And so overall,
we're really within just a few days
of exactly where we thought we'd be at this point
about three months after launch.
And that sets us up to be on track
for completing the rest of commissioning
within the six months after launch
and turning over to science starting that summer.
So it's an amazing place to be.
Thank you so much, Marshall.
We have one more speaker to talk a little bit
about that science that Marshall was discussing.
But just a reminder, after that, we will be taking questions
from media on the line.
You can press star one to get into the queue
and for social media, post your questions with the hashtag
unfold the universe.
Thank you so much.
Next, we have Jane Rigby from NASA's Goddard.
Thank you, Karen.
So you've you've heard from the other speakers,
but I'm just going to say it again.
The telescope performance
so far is everything that we dared hope.
The optics work.
The goal here was to build a telescope 100 times
more powerful than anything we've had before
from the early engineering data that we have seen so far.
We know that we're on track to meet
those very demanding science requirements.
The engineering images that we saw today
are as sharp and as crisp
as the images that Hubble can take,
but are at a wavelength of light that is totally invisible
to Hubble.
So this is making the invisible universe
snap into very, very sharp focus.
The requirement was to get to the diffraction
limit at two microns.
We nailed it for the astronomers who are listening to microns,
the point
spread function has a full width at half max of 2.3 pixels.
That's 70 billion arcseconds.
The only way to make those images sharper is to just
make a bigger mirror.
Now, we took this
image to characterize the sharpness,
but you can't help but see those thousands of galaxies
behind it, right?
They're really gorgeous.
Webb can't.
There's no way that Webb can look for 12 seconds
at any point in the sky and not go incredibly deep.
So this is going to be the future from now on, wherever
we look.
It's a deep field
where Webb is seeing back in time to galaxies
that we're seeing that light as it looked billions of years ago
without even really breaking a sweat.
So where we are right now, we have not taken any science
data yet.
We are still commissioning.
And so what does that mean and what's next?
So right now, the telescope is aligned to near
one of the science instruments.
We now have to align the telescope to all four
of the science instruments.
So every one
of those four instruments is getting a crisp image.
And these four science instruments,
we have to get ready for prime time.
We're getting them ready for science.
One of those four science
instruments, Mary, which eventually is going to be
the coldest thing on the observatory.
It's seven degrees above absolute zero.
It's still cooling.
So we're cooling that instrument and we are taking
the science instruments through their checkout period.
And so, you know, this is the process that we
this is the process where we know that, yes, this is
these instruments are working
to do the science that we need them to do.
So the transition to science will happen in July
where we finished commissioning and we move into
a very demanding year of science operations.
We have already selected it's prepared and ready to go.
A year of really compelling,
demanding science with this telescope.
And I'm just so excited to see the science which was
competitively selected. Right.
We received more than a thousand proposals.
We picked the very best ones
so that science is going to be studying galaxies
that where we're seeing the light
as we're seeing these galaxies, they're so far away
that we see them as they looked only a couple hundred
million years after the Big Bang So we're seeing back in time.
This is what we're going to be
doing in Cycle one to understand how
how galaxies like our own
Milky Way formed and then evolved over
13.7 billion years of cosmic time.
Webb will be studying planets that orbit other stars
And more than that, we'll be able to study
the atmospheres of those planets to understand
what they're made of.
You know, a lot of our science is going to be understood
What stuff is made out through a process called spectroscopy?
What are the atmospheres made of?
What are galaxies made of?
Fundamentally, this telescope is going to explore
how we got here and what's out there
in our gorgeous universe.
And that's just starting to come into view now.
Thank you so much, Jane.
We are going to move on to the question and answer portion.
We're going to open up the mikes
for the first question, please
If we don't have our first question,
I can pull up a social media question, but let me know
I'm going to go
to social media question while we work that out.
We have a question from Peter on Facebook.
Who is asking,
what about pointing the telescope at different stars?
How is it going to rotate?
Are there actuate or is to facilitate this?
Or does the entire spacecraft move?
You won't take it or say yeah or
so the way Webb moves
that some people think the telescope moves
with respect to the sunshield, but that's not the case.
The telescope and the sunshield all move as a single object.
So the whole observatory
tips and tilts to move across the sky.
The way that happens is there's a thing
called reaction wheels these are, in essence,
big spinning wheels, like a gyroscope within the body
of the observatory,
and they spin one way
to spin the whole telescope the other way,
and that lets the telescope track across the sky.
We then have a fine guidance sensor.
That was the contribution from the Canadian Space Agency
that locks on stars and stabilizes the images,
moving a mirror that adjusts within the third mirror, within
the fourth mirror, within the telescope,
tips and tilts in response to the signals
in the fine guidance sensor to lock onto the different stars
And that's also something we've tested out over the last
few weeks, and it's working very well at this point.
Great. Thank you so much.
We seem to have worked out the problem
with the phone lines, but they should be on now.
So we'll take the first question.
And our first question comes from
Seth Bornstein from the Associated Press.
Your line is now open
Yes. Thank you for doing this.
I guess this is for James
first image.
Can you tell us what star is this?
How far away is this?
Is this as this star been seen
with Hubble or any other telescope?
And what is the difference between the image you're showing
and whatever knowledge we've had in the past
year or so?
Is that that and how much in the past is this star
and how many galaxies are we seeing in the background?
Sure.
So we sort of plucked this star out of obscurity,
minding its own business.
It is point.
It is up looking out of the plane of our solar system.
And we picked it because it was convenient
for the wavefront folks.
It is a nice, boring star of about the right brightness
brightness. And it's off by itself
with no other bright stars nearby.
It's a pretty much generic anonymous star in the sky.
That worked
well for the kind of sensing measurements
we needed to do the brightness of that star.
It's about a hundred times fainter than the visible
than the human eye could see.
And that's the one that looks
so blindingly bright in this image
to get a sense of how sensitive the telescope is.
I don't know.
I can get back to you on how far away that that star is,
but we think it's sort of just a generic
average star in our inner galaxy.
And then the the what was known behind that,
because this isn't a famous deep field.
This is just we've made we've made it a fairly deep field,
but it was just a star.
So the brightest stars in that image are known in
previous study
surveys, the brightest galaxies, everything else there is new
So I'll just add once again,
this star is one of many stars we used throughout
the commissioning process of of Webb.
We've gotten a lot of questions about the stars we're using.
They're generally picked out
not because they're special stars,
but because they're the right brightness
in the right parts of sky for our engineering tests.
They're intentionally, at this point, not special stars.
They're just
here's a generic star we can use to focus the telescope.
Thank you very much.
We will go on to our next question, please.
Our next question is from Chris Jabour.
From NASA's space flight.
Your line is now open.
I can. Yes.
Thank you so much.
I'm wondering, looking out a little bit ahead
to the rest of the Mira alignment,
you mentioned that you have to align it
to each of the instruments.
So I'm wondering
if each time the telescope observes something,
do you have to basically realign it to each of the instruments,
or are you trying to find a one alignment that works for them?
All. And in particular,
like how would that work going forward with practical
observations in terms of seeing all the way back
and seeing very, very close objects in our own solar system?
Thank you. Question.
Yeah, I can answer that.
That's a good question.
You know, we we initially lines to near Cam
as an instrument because it has that's
some of those special optics in their filter wheel
that Marshall mentioned just for our alignment process.
Now that we've gone through
that fine alignment process with your cam,
we will take a look at the other instruments
across the field of view and we'll balance the alignment
of the entire telescope up to all four of the instruments
so that they're
all in focus and they're all nice and sharp.
But once we're done with that process,
then we leave it alone basically.
And we only do maintenance operations is what we call them.
So every couple of days we'll take a measurement
and see how the alignment looks see how the wavefront looks,
and if it's drifted a little bit, maybe for thermal drifts
or other reasons,
then we can make a tiny correction we'll still be making
on the nanometer size moves at that point.
So we won't be realigning the telescope.
We'll just keep it in focus and maintain it
throughout mission life.
Thanks.
We are ready for our next question.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Alisha Belzer from Mashable.
Your line is now open.
Hi. Thank you for doing this and congrats.
I was hoping just for the general public,
could you explain the features of the image?
In other words, what's causing those big, bright lights,
structures and what's giving the image its red color?
Thanks.
Yeah.
So I can help you a little bit.
So first of all,
the the color that's actually the colors that we used.
The engineers use to to display it.
But the actual light that's coming in
is infrared light,
which you would not normally be able to see with your eye.
So we wound up using red
to help us see the contrast in the image.
And that's what we're displaying here.
But in terms of what you're that the spikes that you see
coming out of the star,
any telescope that has special structures
like this, the shape of our mirrors
will have that kind of spikes in it.
Those are actually
the result of, in this case, having hexagonal segments
So we have these six sided mirrors
and we also have our struts are the things that hold
the secondary mirror up.
And because of the sort of the way that light travels
and that actually causes something called diffraction
that makes those spikes.
And you see that most intensely
when you have a very bright star
and the other stars in the field,
you don't see it as much because they're dimmer.
And those effects are much harder to see.
And that's why you only see it in that very bright star.
Thank you so much, Marshall.
We are going to continue with some more media questions.
Next ones up All right.
And our next question is from Bill Harwood from CBS News.
Your line is open.
Hey, thank you very much.
Yeah, I just want to follow up on an earlier question
because I'm still a little bit confused about
the alignment to date and then what has to be done
for the other instruments.
So I'm taking it that you're perfectly aligned
there have been the focus is a sharp,
sharp as you can get it.
But are you moving?
I don't understand.
If it's the secondary
that you remove at this point or individual segments to it
to achieve that focus for everybody.
I guess I'm just not visualizing how that works
or how the internal mirrors and will play into all of that.
Thanks.
So the
primary things we're doing that are still in front of us.
The secondary mirror right now is actually fairly well aligned.
And we know not we know that not just because of the star
that we just showed you,
but the other stars in that field
tell us it's pretty well aligned.
But we want to we want to make it
as good as possible
so that it's balance for all four instruments.
So we do we do have to do a little bit of
very small tweaks to the secondary mirror alignment
and then also the instruments themselves.
Several of the instruments
have the ability to focus internally to the instrument,
and that's something
we still need to do is to get them focused
once the telescope itself
is fully aligned and fully focused in a way
that balances off our instruments.
It's a very minor change that's in front of us.
But when you're trying to do sort of transformative science,
you have to really get to the ultimate performance.
And it'll be a few weeks to do this, but we will be able
to leave the telescope from that time forward.
Thank you so much.
And we will move on to our next
question, please, from the media.
Our next question comes from Eileen Woodward from WSJ.
Your line is now open.
Hi. Thank you so much for this.
I just wanted to ask,
do you think that you have sort of passed the performance
Rubicon in terms of between now and June
and July, when you expect to start scientific observations
and see first imagery of that deep universe?
Do you anticipate any problems between then and now?
It seems to me like coarse and fine phrasing were sort of
the big thing that we wanted to achieve, and you've done so.
I'm curious if you anticipate any issues between now and then.
We'll start out with Thomas for that question.
So I'm really interested in other answers Actually,
I just want to tell you, of all the sleepless nights
I've had and kind of the worries I've had
that are all behind us now,
and it's not because there is no path ahead.
There's still a mountain to climb.
There are important tasks that need to be done
and important things that need to be proven,
such as the alignment, as I was also all the modalities in each
one of the instruments needs to be tested and calibrated.
So there's important stuff ahead.
But I want to tell you, you you know, kind of what's behind us.
We're way up that mountain now.
We're way up that mountain.
Yes. There's a path that
and you know, in our world, there's always a path ahead.
We never go say we're done.
We can take it easy now.
So so kind of the way we create success is by,
frankly, focusing on the issues that are still ahead.
And we're worrying about
But I'm interested in other opinions or other
statements to that.
Well, I I do want to say one thing is,
you know, we do know now that we built the right telescope
in terms of the optics, that is not going to change.
And that's something that the fine
phasing process is brought out.
We've been able to analyze those images
and we know we built the right telescope.
And, of course, you know, that's a big deal.
And so so that's partially why we're here today.
But but as Thomas said and others have said,
you know, there is work to go.
So we're not there on the entire observatory.
But just to take that image, you know, that was a 2100
second image. A lot of things had to work.
We had to be able to point,
we had to be able to,
you know, guide, which means kind of track on that star.
Precisely.
It was a fairly long period of time that we took that image.
So there's a lot of things that are working really well,
but there is more work to go.
All right.
Thank you.
We will go to the next question from the phone lines.
And our next question comes
from Alexandria with from Nature magazine.
Your line is now open.
Great. Thank you.
My question is for Jane Rigby.
Can you just
pass forward a little bit more to sort of first science again?
We hear dates of June, July.
Can you
be a little bit more precise on when we'll have more timing
on which of those dates, which of those months is accurate?
And also, what do we know about kind of the super secret
first science observations that are going to be made?
Have those targets been chosen?
I know you can't
tell us what they are, but have those targets been chosen?
Okay. In reverse order?
Yes. The targets have been chosen for the super secret
first images that will be released.
The science targets, of course, have all been chosen.
We've selected more than a full year of science,
and those operate those targets have been chosen
and those programs have been fully specified.
The computer files that tell the little Web
how to take the data, we have all those in hat in hand
As far as the specifics, we are going.
We will start science operations
when we are done with commissioning.
Commissioning is nominally six months long.
We launched on Christmas Day So that would be the end of June
Great.
Thank you.
Moving on to the next question, please.
Right.
And our next question comes from Passant Bobby from Inverse.
Your line is now open.
Thank you. Yes.
I'm wondering, you know,
how have was seen all of these stunning images, images
but with James Webb just looking at more distant objects?
Is there a esthetic value or sort of visual value?
Less important is more about the data with these images
both.
And like I mean, they're gorgeous.
Like, you can't help but enjoy the seeing that this
is part of why
we're all astronomers is to study the stars,
because many of us up here on stage,
you know, looked at the sky as kids or looked at pictures
from Hubble or other telescopes and said, that's amazing.
But in addition, we want to make the technical
scientific measurements
and some of the measurements we make with Web will be,
you know,
not as visually stunning that will be series of lines.
There will be this the spectra,
some of the measurements with Webb will be, I think,
even more stunning multicolor imagery.
We're going to have there's two instruments in Webb
that have what's called the Integral Field Spectrograph
that gives you an image,
but not in three colors, but in thousands of colors at once.
And those are going to be some some really neat data to see.
And that's part of the complexity
with calibrating the instruments.
So I think
just like with Hubble, there are some Hubble images
that we take that do have deep esthetic value
and they have scientific value and it's always a both.
And yeah, and some of what we're getting from the spectroscopy,
you know, we'll be telling you how galaxies are rotating
and how the gas in those galaxies is getting blown
out of them by supernova and will be determining what
the composition of what the gas in galaxies is
and the composition of the atmospheres of planets
so that you know, maybe it's a little bit geekier,
but what you get out of it is really, really cool.
So we will both be doing stuff that makes us giddy and happy
and always
gorgeous and stuff where we say, Oh my God, now we know what.
Now we know what that's made of that we never did before.
It's a great, great answer.
I'm looking for a lot of giddy
and happy as we as we go forward.
All right.
We'll take the next question, please.
Next question comes from George Divorce from Gizmodo.
Your line is now open.
Hey, guys, thank you very much for doing this.
I just want to go back again to any potential issues
that may still be encountered
as the commissioning phase continues.
And I'm just hoping
that you guys could be a bit more specific
in particular when it comes to the instrumentation,
the upcoming steps, are there any, you know,
potential points of failure that could really disrupt
the unveiling of the telescope
and I know that
Tom has already said that nothing's going
to keep him up at night anymore.
But I'm wondering, the rest of the team agrees with that.
Are there any steps
or that are really still kind of harrowing or problematic
that could really disrupt the process?
Thanks, guys.
I could take that.
So, you know, we've had days on this project
where if it didn't work, we were going to go home, right?
If the sunshield hadn't come out,
well, then we don't have a mission.
If the secondary mirror hadn't deployed,
we call it secondary now because it's not important,
but because it's the second after the primary,
if the secondary hadn't come out,
all that beautiful light coming into the primary
was just going to bounce off into space forever.
And we wouldn't detect it.
So there were parts
on this mission where it's like, well,
this is going to work or we're done.
We're past those points.
Now, that's what Thomas was getting at.
And we're now to the stage where if things don't work,
we're looking at degrade.
You know,
we're looking at
partial degradation of the total science return.
We have four science instruments.
All four of them have turned on and said,
hi, our aliveness check says we're okay for some of those.
For three of those instruments, we have data.
They're coming back. Yes. This is looking okay.
It's early days.
Mary has to cool
from it's in the temperatures in the nineties right now.
90 Kelvin.
90 something Kelvin.
It needs to get down to seven Kelvin.
So that's something that I'm looking at right.
This this has this closed circuit refrigerator
that circulates helium to chill Murray
much colder than the rest of the of the science instruments.
So that's something we're okay.
That's a big deal.
We want to get very cold, but we're now looking at where
I mean, yes,
space is a dangerous environment and Webb is up there in space
and every day we have to keep it safe
and there's work to do to do that.
But most of what we're looking at going forward is
if things don't work, we're looking at gradual degradation
of the total return rather than shows over folks.
And the key thing about the telescope is the telescope
feeds all four instruments.
So when the telescope doesn't work,
then that really affects the entire mission.
And we're now beyond that point.
Now, there's always the potential that some subsystem
might not work at some point.
That happens
but we have a lot of redundancy in all
of our electrical systems.
So from the point of view of having a working observatory,
as Jane said, you know, we're in very good shape
and so now we're really going to be focusing
more on individual instruments and bringing them online
Thank you so much.
We will take the next question from the phone lines, please.
Our next question comes from Marina Warren from Atlantic.
Your line is now open.
Hi, everyone.
Can you tell us more about the group that chose
the top secret targets for the first big image release?
How big
is the group who was involved and from which institutions,
and what exactly was the list of targets finalized?
You get back to them.
What I am hearing in the room is that we will get back to you
on that Marina.
I don't know that
we have the exact size and people at our fingertips,
but I will follow up with you when this is over.
You can drop me an email and I will get you what I can on that.
Do you like the second
question, given that we couldn't answer your first?
I do.
Thank you for it.
Can you tell us so we've
heard a bit about the start at the center of this image.
Can you tell us more about the galaxies
that are in the background you know, what, how,
how far they are and how does this compare to how
well we'll see galaxies in the future in a closer.
Well, again, it's all right.
Well, I guess I'm the galaxy geek in this crowd.
Okay.
So as we said, this wasn't a famous deep field.
This isn't a place where
we studied, where we've known what's out there.
Just eyeballing it.
I mean, we got those data.
They came down Saturday night.
So I was eyeballing them Sunday morning in my pajamas and
and, yeah, they're like, you know,
they're several billion light years away,
but we actually have to take some spectroscopy
to get you a better answer than that.
We can do spectroscopy once we get the science
instruments ready to go.
And so that's the sort of thing that Webb will be able to do
once we get into normal science operations
of the Near Speck instrument.
Which was made by the European Space Agency,
has this really cool micro shutter
array where it has a quarter
of a million little doors that can open and close.
And so we can take spectra of dozens of targets
within that field.
And so one of the key science capabilities that this telescope
has is to target a field like that and pick
the most interesting 30, 40 galaxies and say,
I want a spectrum of that that that that
that that that's at that that and with that, you know
exactly how far away each of those galaxies are.
And depending how you do it,
you understand how much heavy elements
carbon, oxygen, nitrogen those galaxies have relative
to hydrogen.
So that tells you how many times the gas in those galaxies
has gone through stars and then exploded in supernovae.
It's one
thing to that which is that we picked this field
just for the the wavefront sensing calibration.
It was not chosen for these galaxies,
but all the data we're taking and commissioning
is going to be public
when we get to the end of commissioning in June.
And so, you know, scientists out there,
their grad students at some university
can download these data in June and start
answering these questions from this and all the other data
that's taken during this commissioning process.
June or July, we get to where we get done.
Yeah.
When we when we get past that, all of the calibration data,
including the
these images around the fine phase and target
in multiple wavelengths, we're just going
to let that data out to the scientific community
along with those other observations.
All right.
We are going to take a few of our social media questions now.
We'll take two.
The first one is to guarantee on Instagram asks,
what is the precision between the mirror segments
now that they are aligned when it comes to the alignment
Well, do you want to talk to that?
We in your presentation.
Oh, so our actuators have a resolution.
We can move and maintain a motor position
to about nine to ten nanometers.
So that's our capability
and our sensing requirements.
And our sensing budget means that our we aren't
actually within ten nanometer segment to segment,
but we're I think we're down to 40
where we're below 100 meters easily.
Yeah.
We're nothing
that's over the whole whole telescoping range instruments.
Whole system with a full system. Yeah.
So each individual segment
to the other segment is well under 100 nanometers
Great.
Our second social media question is from Brian and
Brian in motion on Twitter,
who asks, what, if any, are the lessons learned from Web
so far that we can take into the next space telescope?
Are there any things that could be done differently?
Yeah,
You know, one thing about Web, I mean, obviously
it's a super cold telescope,
and that really drove a lot of the design.
Of course, that huge sunshield was needed to cool things down,
but it's also a passively thermal telescope.
And what that means is that unlike, for example,
the Keck telescope,
which is a ground telescope in Hawaii
where they actively move mirrors,
the web mirrors are designed to be to always
just kind of be where they are.
And then only every few days do we update them.
And that made a lot of sense for a really cold telescope,
but it also made it difficult to prove the telescope
was going to work
and to design everything
from the mirrors to the structure that holds it.
And so one of the things that we think
in the future for these large segmented telescopes
is we will make use of the types of things
that ground telescopes have which are active controls
and that would make our ability to test it easier
and it would make it make us also be able to make it
even finer telescope, which some of the future observatories
may want to do for example, if you want to study exoplanets,
particularly Earth like planets around stars,
which is one of the future missions
that has been recommended by a National Academy Committee,
You're going to need
a very precise mirror service that's extremely stable.
And so we are going to probably
want to migrate from this sort of approach
we took for this very cold teles
All right.
We are
going to move back to the media questions on the phone line.
We'll take the next question, please.
And as a reminder, to ask
a question over the phone, please press star one
Our next question comes from Ken Kramer from Space Up Close.
The line is now open
and vacillations
on the face itself so far.
One thing that was really good
to know was about the amount of cooling,
how far you almost felt like you're at 90 k now.
Oh, I'm going to take you to get the seventh day,
which is the fall and winter
I want to talk about the commissioning of the space.
When you get to that. Thank you.
I'm going to repeat that.
That can because was a little hard to hear you.
And here I think the question was how long to get
from where we are now to the seven degrees Kelvin.
And also to talk a little bit more about science
commissioning, commissioning of the science instruments.
Correct. Yeah.
I mean, yes, that's it. Thank you.
Great. Thank you.
So so the cooling process
takes a couple of weeks and and so
and we actually will be using
once we have that Mid-infrared instrument
fully operational, we actually will use it
to make sure that the telescopes bounce sort of the last step,
which, you know, our target
was to finish in the end of April,
but it takes a couple of weeks to do the cool down
roughly ten to 14 days.
And then as we stabilize it, we'll start taking images
and make sure everything is working right.
There's a few different transitions
that it goes under as it cools down. So.
So it's a couple of process.
The detail that the
the cooler has its own complicated calibration process.
Usually the telescope has a multistep process.
This is not just a refrigerator
that you turn on, but has its own.
I think it's a six step process and be there right now on the
the third stage of that cool down process.
The fourth stage will begin about a week from now.
And that's really going to accelerate the cooling of memory
And then
we really address
the what's happening, the science commissioning next
with the commissioning instruments.
You want to mention just what our next steps are.
Yeah, it was just what's happening
next for commissioning of the science instruments.
We have covered some of that.
Let's see.
So science instruments
mirror has to get cold that is the really big one.
We're walking through the for each instrument.
There's a set of
of activities
that each one has to show that it is working.
And it's things like stepping through the filter wheel
and making sure that you get every position,
the filter wheel that you want, getting the darks because
when you're when to understand the properties of the detector
so that we can take that out so that we're seeing the sky
and not what the not what the detectors are doing.
So there's doing so we're doing every step
in that to get those instruments ready for science.
Thank you.
We are taking two more media questions.
We'll take the next one, please.
Our next question comes from Irene Klotz from Aviation Week.
Your line is now open.
Thanks very much.
I have two questions.
Well, one question for Jane and then for Thomas.
Are you seeing any impacts in the GWC
science community?
Over the situation in Ukraine?
Are there any Russian astronomers, astrophysicists
involved in any of that first year science
and for Thomas, can you address that same question
more generally to the NASA science program?
Thanks. So thank you, Irene.
Unfortunately,
I'm going to have to circle up with you afterwards
we're going to try and stick
to some of the science and the alignment right now.
But I will get you
any information, an update on statements we have.
So I'll circle up with you as soon as we're done here.
If you
have another question, I would take it,
otherwise we can go to the next one.
Oh, couldn't Thomas not address
that question either?
Yeah, well, we'll stick to
to responding offline
Thank you.
And our next question comes from Daniel
Lara from our drone UI.
Your line is now open Hi.
How are you doing?
And thank you for this excellent relations.
Well, I think this question would be for Thomas
and even the little time would with
this beautiful telescope.
And it would be doing some plans
to review the telescope to get more
lifetime on this
So you're you're right that we're every time
we build a telescope, we think about how long we can
operate it.
I want to tell you that that delivery
by Arianespace and the European Space Agency was just fabulous.
Frankly, the lifetime of the telescope
that we initially said you know, about a decade or so
is, we believe, exceed
it based on what we see there as we're kind of learning
how to operate and point in sky,
the estimates of the lifetime
will really become more accurate.
So as we come to the end of commissioning,
I'm sure we'll get far much more accurate update.
I don't know whether there's anything you can say already
now that you haven't already said you were the person
who talked
about Lifetime before, but that's what's on our mind.
I think that I think Mike mentioned
during one of the meeting,
one of the press events that he thought it would be 20 years.
And the one thing I can add is that on the actuation
you know, we they have a, they will last
as long as the rest of the observatory.
They're working exactly the way we expected.
They have a very long lifetime.
So there's, there's no changes to anything
in the sense of the lifetime of the system.
Yeah.
And I don't think there's any new updates.
But as Thomas mentioned, as we go through commissioning
there might be some other additional updates
from the systems team
Okay.
Is this opportunity to make a new question?
I think we do have time. Yes.
Go right ahead.
Okay.
What will be the next target of the when science
starts on inside the solar system?
Inside the solar system.
There is an early release
science program to study
either Jupiter, Saturn to study them,
to study the gas giants
in our own solar system and in particular, their moons.
So there is a program to do that that has been competitively
selected and is in the queue.
We are doing some commissioning activities
to go double check that we can look at a target
as bright as a planet in our own solar system and still be able
to point at and get data on the nearby orbiting moons.
Well,
there are also some approved programs to do Trojan asteroids,
and there's an approved program to study
those asteroids that are interstellar visitors
from our solar system,
from other asteroids that have come in from outside
our solar system.
Right, Jane.
And of course, the reason these are such a high priority
and they did so well in the reviews is, of course,
as we have other missions actually
exploring the solar system,
the information that we can get
from this amazing telescope, but really help us run
these missions better.
Lucy is on its way to the very,
very bodies that you just talked about.
And yesterday, I met with the Clipper team
that of course, is going to launch in 24,
that amazing mission to go to Europe,
which is one of those moments that you just talked about.
Thank
you so much to everybody who has watched today
who was on the line
asking questions and who has talked to us today.
We are going to finish up now.
You can follow along and learn more about this
amazing telescope
and what's coming up this summer
and all of the incredible science
that we have talked about here today on nasa.gov slash web.
That's Web.
You can also follow along on the social media conversation
using hashtag unfold the universe.
And of course, nasa.gov is going to tell you all about the way
that Web interacts with all these other
incredible science missions and all that
we're doing in the solar system and beyond.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Goodbye.