Five centuries ago, Copernicus concluded that the earth rotates around the sun. Five decades ago, men first walked on the moon. Ten years ago, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space, becoming the first spacecraft to depart our solar system.
To this catalogue of scientific leaps we can now add the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). At the White House last Monday, President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris and NASA administrator Bill Nelson unveiled JWST’s first image to a waiting world.
The full-colour print captures thousands of galaxies in a single frame. Not stars. Galaxies. The main cluster is 4.6 billion light years away, with many more distant than that. Humans have never seen anything like it.
Nelson put the picture in context: “This image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. It’s just a tiny sliver of the vast universe.”
The telescope, conceived in the 1980s, is a $10 billion collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. It was launched from French Guiana on Christmas Day 2021, and travelled 1.5 million kilometres to reach its orbit. That’s four times the distance of the moon from earth. By contrast, the ageing Hubble telescope it is designed to replace orbits just 550km above Earth. JWST is 100 times more powerful than Hubble.
Because of its position, JWST can observe one-third of the sky at any time. In a calendar year, it can zoom in any direction in space. Over its projected 20-year lifespan, it will study the formation of the universe from its earliest days after the big bang to the creation of stars and protoplanetary systems.
It will investigate remote planets capable of sustaining life, perhaps providing evidence towards answering the eternal question of whether we are alone.
Not all its work will focus on galaxies far, far away. JWST will also explore closer to home, to provide greater insight into the evolution of our solar system. After the first batch of snapshots, NASA released fresh photos of Jupiter. Their clarity and detail surprised even the project’s scientists, adding to their excitement for potential discoveries ahead.
This is a moonshot moment but you could be forgiven for not noticing. When Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11 onto the Sea of Tranquility, the world watched transfixed. For a moment it made real the sense that we are but a tiny speck on an incomprehensible tapestry. In that instant, our temporal concerns seemed as fleeting as a footprint in the Grand Canyon.
Now we have become blasé about scientific and technological marvels. Ours is a world unlike any previous generation has known. We still have challenges and conflicts and misery, of course, but also miracles and wonders. We carry access to the sum of human knowledge in our pockets, but prefer TikTok videos. We can jet halfway around the planet in a day, yet we fume about lost luggage. Scientists can invent a wonder drug to protect us from a pandemic virus, but many whine about wearing masks to protect others. We have a helicopter flying on Mars that few people could even name.
Maybe it’s only to be expected. Given the pace of change in our lifetimes, perhaps it’s all we can do to keep up.
So pause a moment, and reflect on the James Webb Space Telescope. Check out its photos. Consider what it demonstrates about the sheer brilliance of the thousands of workers who designed it, built it, launched it, and will operate it for years.
Imagine what we might all learn from their efforts. Set aside your cynicism that America is a land of fools and failure, and acknowledge that it remains the essential country, for now, that makes such progress possible.
As Biden said last week: “It’s a new window into the history of our universe. And today we’re going to get a glimpse of the first light to shine through that window.”
