Webb reveals our insignificance — and potential
For a hundred days in 2017, dozens of our neighbors working at NASA's Johnson Space Center had the privilege of hands-on experience with one of humankind's most remarkable scientific accomplishments. While Hurricane Harvey pummeled Houston and environs — and the Astros were winning a World Series — JSC tended to the $10 billion-plus James Webb Space Telescope.
Various instruments of the soon-tobe space-based observatory, 25 years in the making, were sealed and tested in a giant vacuum chamber cooled to 40 degrees above absolute zero, a temperature meant to simulate conditions a million miles from Earth.
JSC's astrophysicists and engineers who watched over the Webb are among an estimated 20,000 people from 29 states and 14 countries who have worked on the revolutionary telescope since its inception. A sterling model of international cooperation, the NASA-led project is a joint effort of the United States, the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency.
Launched on Christmas Day last year and now settled into its orbit around the sun, NASA's flawlessly functioning instrument is transmitting full-color images more astounding than even the most star-struck astronomer could have expected. Because the light transmitting those images travels at a constant speed, seeing farther in distance means we're also seeing farther back in time, which means, as NASA Administrator Bill Nelson put it, “We're going back almost to the beginning.”
From the unfathomable depths of space and time, the Webb is reminding us that so-called space is richer and more textured than we might have imagined. We're seeing the first light of galaxies forming more than 13 billion years ago, galaxies that contain anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars. We're seeing galaxies colliding. We're seeing a galaxy swirling in futile resistance to a black hole so massive it emits the energy of 40 billion suns. We're seeing cosmic dust kicked up by the energy of a new star forming 7,600 light years away, across distances greater than our solar system. We're seeing stars in their death throes. These remarkable images are coming to us from what NASA scientists describe as “a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground.”
We can only marvel at the ingenuity built into this technological origami folded onto the nose of an Ariane 5 rocket and then, once in orbit, unfolding like a flower responding to sunlight. Its primary mirror, comprised of gold-coated beryllium panels, is more than 20 feet across. Its multi-layered sunshield is the size of a tennis court, with each layer as thin as notebook paper. NASA engineer Michael Menzel calculated that the Webb launch and deployment faced “344 single-point-of-failure items on average.” Not one item failed.
The Webb images have the power to evoke awe. They also have the potential to change how we see ourselves. While tyrants among us wield death, destruction and misery, while we heedlessly damage this glimmering gem of light and life — the only one we know of in an apparently limitless and expanding universe — the Webb images situate our world, and ourselves, in mind-boggling perspective. We lack words to express, measurements to calculate, concepts to encompass the immensity of reality as glimpsed by our matchless technological achievement.
Occupying the late Carl Sagan's “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” we are insignificant, yes, and yet from our insignificance we reach for the stars. Literally. The Webb helps us hold in place that fulcrum of awareness, that precarious balance between pride and humility.
However insignificant we may be in the cosmic scheme of things, our curiosity can be, should be, almost as limitless as the cosmos itself. We are seeking “reality ever newborn,” to quote the French Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The triumph of the James Webb Space Telescope is a reminder of how much awaits our understanding — of black holes, dark matter, planets outside our solar system, the composition of the cosmos, even, perhaps, the origin and existence of life itself.
“What is so exciting for me, now at this moment in time,” said Eric Berger, our former colleague who's now the senior space editor at Ars Technica, “is that we don't know what Webb will discover, but whatever it does find will be new and teach us so much more about ourselves, and our place in the cosmos.”
As the priest and the astronomer remind us, as our NASA neighbors and a powerful new telescope remind us, we puny, little humans have work to do. Joyous and exciting work that's worth every penny of a $10 billion investment.
These new images evoke awe and put the cosmos in perspective.