by Jeff FoustMonday, July 18, 2022
Despite the anticipation of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope and the expectation that these images would be both aesthetically and scientifically stunning, the last thing you think you’d need to get people hyped about the release of these images is an interesting. rally. “I didn’t know I was going to be in a rally,” Nelson said. “It’s getting better and better. You have a lot to collect.” Still, the atmosphere inside an auditorium last Tuesday at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center resembled that of a high school field before a big Friday night football game. A standing-room audience, ranging from NASA leadership and members of Congress to scientists and engineers who worked on JWST, filled the room, while one half worked in the crowd. “Let’s get excited!” he said, and the crowd cheered loudly. Not loud enough. “You can do a little better than that. Let me hear you again!” she pleaded. The crowd cheered as loudly as before. Pretty good, apparently. Then there were the ersatz cheerleaders, holding gold pom-poms and gold cardboard hexagons that look like the mirror sections of a space telescope. First they lined the staircase leading to the auditorium, shouting so loudly at times that some in the room wondered if something fantastic or disastrous had happened. Later they took the stage. “Give me a J!” they shouted and the audience complied. “Give me a W! Give an S! Give it a T! What is this spell?’ Um, JWST? The atmosphere surprised even some NASA officials. “I didn’t know I was going to be in a rally,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said when he took the stage. “It’s getting better and better. You have a lot to collect.” “When I went up the stairs, when I got to the top, I wanted to throw off my jacket and run to the 50-yard line,” quipped Greg Robinson, program manager for JWST at NASA headquarters, who, decades earlier he played college football. “I don’t know what I would do when I got there.” This over-the-top hyper-excitement extended to the actual image release event, which took place not in this Goddard Auditorium but in studios at the center and other locations in Europe and Canada. The reveal of the four images and a spectrum was spread out over an hour, with plenty of filler in the form of background information, interviews and so on. But the event was riddled with technical glitches as producers tried to jump from one studio to another or upload party streams from Italy to India. When the show tried to switch to Canadian Space Agency headquarters to reveal an exoplanet specter, a YouTube feed appeared on the screen, drawing groans and nervous giggles from the audience in Goddard Auditorium. All could be forgiven, if not entirely forgotten, by the time the images finally surfaced. Images of the Carina Nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula, a galaxy cluster known as Stephan’s Quintet, and a deep field around the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, and a spectrum of the exoplanet WASP-96 b, were welcomed by professional astronomers and the general public alike . “For me, the first thing that stood out about this image,” Amber Straughn, JWST associate program scientist for communications at NASA Goddard, said of the depth-of-field image, “was just the amazing detail that you can see in some of these galaxies. . You can see star forming regions in almost certainly very distant galaxies. They just go out.” “We’re making discoveries and we haven’t really started trying yet. The promise of this telescope is amazing,” Smith said. Even scientists who have been involved with JWST for decades were surprised. “I’ve been working on this project for 20 years, so we’ll have to wait for what we saw,” said René Doyon of the University of Montreal, principal investigator for JWST’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument. “But no. Several times in the last six months I’ve nearly broken my jaw from what I’ve seen, these incredible images.” “I think our fellow scientists will feel the same way when they see the data,” he added. “This data is simply amazing.” That enthusiasm spread to the White House. This in-depth picture was revealed the day before at an event attended by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The oddly organized event—the president, vice president and others sat at desks, with a giant screen in the background—began more than an hour later, and the public portion ended after just ten minutes, with only brief remarks from Biden, Harris and Nelson. However, the briefing continued behind closed doors. “It was really fun. Oh my God,” recalled Jane Rigby, a JWST scientist at Goddard, who was there to explain the images. “They really went crazy. We had an in camera session where we went through all the images and just shared the excitement. They were so excited.” The celebration of the first JWST images at the Goddard Space Flight Center looked like a pep rally, cheerleaders included. (credit: J. Foust)
“The promise of this telescope is amazing”
The purpose of JWST is not to produce images that excite the president and the public, but to deliver cutting-edge science. Early-release observations released last week offered some science: the WASP-96 b spectrum, for example, revealed the presence of water vapor on this “hot Jupiter” exoplanet orbiting close to its star, while the deep-field image revealed a galaxy more than 13 billion years old and therefore dated to less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The observations, however, were more about demonstrating JWST’s science potential. “It was pretty much instrument practice,” Eric Smith, JWST program scientist at NASA headquarters, said in a briefing after the main event. “We’re making discoveries and we haven’t really started trying yet. The promise of this telescope is amazing.” Rigby recalled being moved to see some of the commissioning data, including better-than-expected “razor” images. “Oh my gosh, it’s working and it’s working better than we thought,” he said. “Personally, I went and had an ugly scream, because what the engineers did to build this thing, it’s amazing.” It may take some time to really push the limits of JWST, the scientists suggested. The telescope is now starting a program of observations called Cycle 1, based on proposals submitted by scientists long before the telescope was launched, and therefore based on estimates and predictions. “Everything we were planning for Cycle 1 in the astronomy community was bold, but it wasn’t bold enough,” Smith said. He later explained in the briefing that the astronomers submitting their Round 1 proposals were probably conservative in the number of objects they could observe or the exposure times. “Now, what they’re going to see when they can access that data is that they can expose more quickly in some cases. They can have more goals or they can go deeper than they thought. By Cycle 2 – the next round of observations, proposals for which will be solicited later this year – he said he expected astronomers “will be much more daring because now they know how good the facility is”. Even then, it will take years to analyze the data and make the breakthrough discoveries, from the solar system to the early universe, that the telescope has long promised. “We’ve designed this telescope and instrument to do incredible science that we’re going to start doing now, but we really don’t know what we’re going to find,” Doyon said. He cited the example of the Hubble Space Telescope, launched with the primary scientific goal of measuring the Hubble constant, a measure of the expansion rate of the universe, only to discover that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. “Who knows what’s to come for JWST, but I’m sure we’ll have plenty of surprises.” Astronomers Amber Straughn (left) and Jane Rigby discuss the early release observations in a July 12 briefing. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Beating spec
The reason scientists could be so exuberant and so optimistic about JWST is because the telescope performed better than expected. At its launch last December, NASA warned of hundreds of potential single-point failures during the development and commissioning of the telescope and its instruments, failures that could damage or compromise the mission. “We knew how important this observatory is. It’s the largest, most complex science mission, possibly, that NASA has ever built,” Feninberg said. However, the telescope managed to pass the six-month commissioning process. “I was interviewed on ’60 Minutes,’ and when they asked me about confidence, I said I was 100 percent sure,” Bill Ochs, JWST project manager at Goddard, recalled during a June briefing at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “Now if you were to ask me if it would have gone 100% smoothly, that’s a different question. I would say no, we would have some problems there.” “It’s been an amazing six months,” he added. “Yes, there were moments of relaxation, but when you have confidence in your team, then you know you can overcome those very nervous moments.” This confidence, both in building JWST and commissioning it, has resulted in a telescope that has exceeded expectations. Lee Feinberg, JWST optical telescope component manager at Goddard, that the telescope had a requirement that its analysis be diffraction…
