A View So Far Beyond the Blue Dot: JWST

Science in Service of Human Knowing

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

I can’t remember any other time in my 75 years where I anticipated a sci-tech event with such excitement; and angst.

The eventual Christmas-Day 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope was the peak science-news event of my lifetime. Billions of dollars over budget and delayed for year and years, it was finally going to happen!

I was a little queazy with concern that the massive rocket would not leave the launch pad in one piece. I watched, from hours before launch until several hours later, when the long, silent, boring travel to the L2 Lagrange point began and mission control got some kick-back time for congratulations, so very well deserved.

TO BOLDLY GO

On the way to its station, JWST would begin the hundreds of inter-dependent sub-tasks that if successful, six months later, would produce the first images from Hubble’s successor.

If any one of the mission-critical steps failed…it didn’t bear thinking about. It was what it was going to be: Maybe a ten billion dollar piece of space junk. But at the end of a terrible covid-plagued year, the world needed a beacon of hope. If it succeeded, could this be such an event?

The unfolding of the multi-layered origami heat shields was a nail-biter. But of course, we now know that all went well and JWST has been in constant use exploring space-time with an extension of the human eye, brain and insatiable desire to know.

Here at the link below are some samples of space objects whose incredible dimensions and depth back almost to the big bang can overwhelm and choke you up a bit. Or just be eye candy for snazzy desktop images on your computer. We are all different.

🧿 JWST’s best images: spectacular stars and spiraling galaxies 🧿

SCIENCE FOR ALL

The combined work of scientists and engineers from several cooperating space agencies, the purpose was not to beat the competition; was not to gain military dominance over enemies or to read newspapers over their shoulders from space. It was not done to spin off salable products (think TANG) or pens that could write upside-down. The purpose was to boldly go…

I have been proud of my species in this regard this past year, seeing science at the service of the human quest for knowledge for knowledge’s sake—to put our place and our time, our history and our future more clearly on the map of the cosmos of which this Blue Dot and its diverse inhabitants are a tiny part. For the time being.

What kinds of questions will JWST answer? Some of those answers will likely send us back to the quantum drawing board for a re-write of “facts” we were so long certain of.

ENGAGE!

Entering year TWO of the telescope, NASA now thinks it will stay in service for some 20 years. If I live as long as my mother or hers before her, I will be around for the whole show (and hopefully aware that there IS a show.) But this long view is predicated on the assumption that we can use our demonstrated ingenuity and persistence to keep the home fires burning without burning down the house.

JWST successful launch: A miracle of intelligence, agency, and curiosity. So very many moving parts, hard and soft, to make this happen. May what we learn from this tool make us as wise as smart. See you in ‘23, fellow Earthlings.

Home fires burning, twenty years and one homestead ago.