One-Year Anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope

… the James Webb Space Telescope celebrating quite the milestone this morning. It’s been one year since it transmitted its first image back to Earth. With scientists from Arizona helping to create the very camera responsible for showing those historic pictures to the world.

And in some of these photos, they look like blobs. And we were talking with the scientists about this yesterday, they’re so much more than that obviously. All new for this morning, I did talk with two scientists who worked on the telescope and they tell me Webb’s success, oh, it was a nail biter, was not always a guarantee.

(00:32)
It’s the most powerful telescope ever sent into space.

This telescope was decades in the making, and every time I see a new image I’m just like, worth it, worth it, worth it. It’s incredible.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a major investment for the worldwide scientific community to help us better understand where we came from.

JWST is just the latest in a long line of human beings trying to put themselves in context. To say, “Who are we with respect to everything else.” This is a guidebook for us to understand how we came to be.

Scientists from the University of Arizona, like Dr. Kevin Hainline created NIRCam, the very camera responsible for capturing the historic images Webb has transmitted back to earth over the past year.

You should be very proud as an Arizonan that this is a hometown instrument, that all these pictures really come from this camera that was built here.

Across the world, scientists and engineers helped make the dream of Webb a reality, but room for failure was massive.

There was no guarantee that this was going to work. This observatory, again, back to the engineering, had 344 single points of failure. So that means if any one of those actuators, mechanisms, motors, if they didn’t work flawlessly the first time in space we wouldn’t be seeing these images, we wouldn’t be talking today.

Just one year into space and many historic images later.

We’re still just discovering what this telescope is capable of and uncovering the questions that we didn’t even know to ask.

The James Webb Space Telescope giving us a deeper understanding of our universe and what lies far beyond our solar system.

(02:23)
This celestial birthday of sorts is just the beginning?

Oh yeah. We’ve got hopefully 20 plus years of JWST wowing us. And if this year is any indication, buckle up, the telescope has already changed astronomy. And I think that we’re going to have many, many more years of astronomers looking at images like this and just being wowed and then going, “Well, all right, what do we got to learn? What is in this? What’s next?”

They look like paintings, all those beautiful colors. It was just a fascinating interview. In fact, I’m going to try to put it on my YouTube channel because we had so many moments where I had goosebumps about possible life out there, obviously he wouldn’t go totally into that. But if you think about it, so many light years away, you never know.

Right. Yeah. And I love the collaboration between University of Arizona, ASU scientists, not only making Arizona proud, the world proud, but the galaxy proud.

Yeah. No kidding. No kidding. And we are clearly not done yet, Iris.

Absolutely not. And you know what my favorite part is, yeah, they’re actually learning something from these stunning photos.

Yes.

Unlike us, we’re just looking at how amazing and beautiful they are, they actually pick them apart and learn something new, I’m sure, from every one of them. So thank you for that.