(no audio) - The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest and most powerful telescope in space.

Uncovering secrets of how galaxies were formed and how the universe was created.

- The James Webb Space Telescope is unraveling the mysteries of the universe.

- We'll meet the scientists, engineers and visionaries who brought this telescope to life.

- The early days, just a few people, and a whiteboard, how do we build something that could actually work?

- We're on a mission to unlock secrets from the deepest, darkest parts of the universe.

- We can actually see light that was emitted more than 13 billion years ago.

We literally traveling in time.

- It took so much ingenuity, collaboration and dedication to design and develop this telescope.

I can't wait to see what we discover.

- Being a part of something bigger than yourself, that is really why I did this.

- It's time to go "Behind the Wings".

This is gonna be cool.

I am Myrna James.

I am a science journalist specializing in all things technology.

Here at Wings over the Rockies Air & Space Museum, we transport the magic of space to you right here on Earth.

Today, we're traveling through space and time alongside the James Webb Space Telescope which is the most capable telescope in the cosmos.

Using infrared technology and a revolutionary segmented mirror, Webb can gather six times more light than the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Webb is uncovering how the universe was created and is answering questions so profound we didn't even know we had them.

With the ability to observe galaxies more than 13 billion light years from Earth, get ready to travel through time.

Webb launched in 2021 but the idea was sparked more than 20 years ago at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

- It's human nature somehow to be fascinated by space and our place in the universe.

So I was taken by that, just like anyone.

When I started on the Webb in 1997, there were just a few of us.

It was just an idea but in front of us was to figure out how do we build something that could actually work.

The Webb mission was conceived in the late 1980s, early 1990s, to connect the dots between the achievement of NASA's COBE satellite which showed us the oldest light in the universe.

Around the same time, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched.

- [Announcer] Two, one and lift off of the space shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe.

- And it took its deepest image of the cosmos that it was capable of doing at that time and that deep field image, so it looked back in time to a point when the universe was about a billion years old.

The EPOCH that COBE saw, the universe was a few hundred thousand years old.

And so between those two EPOCHs is a mysterious, poorly studied EPOCH that was referred to then as the cosmic dark zone.

And it's a great scientific interest because that is the point in the evolution of the universe when the first stars and galaxies formed.

The answers to all our questions are in starlight and we have to be clever enough to extract that information.

- In order to create a telescope that can see further back in time, NASA needed to invent new technology that could gather light from some of the first stars and galaxies in the universe.

But first, they had to overcome the challenges that plagued the earlier space telescopes.

Hubble, for instance, required hands-on human repairs.

- A lot of people today don't even remember but when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, the primary mirror actually wasn't quite the right shape and could not focus light properly.

- The significant spherical aberration appears to be present in the optics.

- There was actually multiple repair missions and upgrade missions for Hubble.

The very first one was really to fix the blurry vision and then from then on, we were really upgrading the instruments.

John Grunsfeld was an astronaut who helped to upgrade the instruments.

- The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990.

In 1992, I became an astronaut.

At the edge of the telescope which is 2.4 meters across, the shape of the mirror was wrong by about 1/40th of the width of a human hair but that was enough to make the images slightly fuzzy.

So for an astronomer, that was bad.

So instead of being a great observatory in all this anticipation, it was a sort of good observatory or maybe a little less.

As an astronomer going to the Hubble Space Telescope, it's kind of the holy grail of an astronaut's mission.

And I had the unbelievable fortune of being able to go up three times to the Hubble and do all kinds of repairs and upgrades to the telescope such that now Hubble's coming up on its 33rd birthday on orbit and everything's working and we're still doing incredible science.

- [Myrna] So you were actually able to get inside the telescope here?

- Yep, now clearly this is just a model, the real telescope is five times bigger, about the size of a tour bus.

And what you can see is that the telescope has handrails that we could use to climb around the telescope but more importantly, it was designed to be modular, to be fixed, not only to put in new electronics but to put in new scientific instruments.

And so we were able to open these doors on orbit.

You know I was able to climb inside the telescope to take out the old scientific instruments and put new ones in.

And so you can see this opening was big enough, even for my spacewalking partner, Steve Smith, who's about 6'2", in this spacesuit to fit inside.

- So you did eight space walks, does it ever get old?

- I wondered during training whether I would ever get tired of getting into the spacesuit and going into the big pool, we called a Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.

You know, I have spent hundreds and hundreds of dives in the space suit practicing and even that is not old.

Eight spacewalks - every one is just spectacular and magical.

I was on the end of the robotic arm moving back towards the Hubble Space Telescope, when all of a sudden I thought, is this real?

You know I just can't believe that I'm here out in a vacuum in my space suit with the Hubble Space Telescope orbiting the earth going 17,500 miles an hour.

You know, it was kinda silly but I just reached out with my index finger and touched the Hubble to make sure it was real.

And then of course it was all work from then on.

- So the ability to upgrade the Hubble on orbit is one reason that it's still so productive and still up there after 33 years.

And that's not true about the Webb telescope.

It's actually about a million miles out.

- The James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared observatory, that's light from heat.

And so we have to put the James Webb Space Telescope really far away from the earth so that it wouldn't see the Earth's warmth but that has a downside.

It's too far away, it's a million of miles from earth.

So the James Webb Space Telescope is high stakes that we can't go fix it.

And so a lot of effort was put into making sure that it would work the first time.

It's gonna be amazing what we find out but I think the biggest discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope is probably gonna be the answer to a question we haven't thought of.

Something we truly discover that we never knew about.

- What did it take to build the most powerful space telescope?

With any project as ambitious as the Webb telescope, it takes thousands of people and many, many years.

For some of them, their entire career was riding on its success and it actually went perfectly.

Webb was primarily built, engineered and designed at Northrop Grumman Space Park.

The components were manufactured in laboratories across the globe, then were sent back to the Space Park campus for assembly.

- The telescope itself and all the components came from different places across the U.S. and across the globe.

And over behind me, that's where we did all of the engineering work to come up with the design, to come up with the ideas of how we were gonna put it together, et cetera.

- So Charlie, why are telescopes so important?

- What made Galileo think he needed to make a telescope?

It is to go see the things that we can't see with our naked eye.

So we call it a telescope but it's so much more than that.

There are unbelievable quantities of materials that went into that telescope from all around the world.

Exotic materials that are really lightweight, some that are very hard, very stiff, all kinds of different materials that engineers used to put together the telescope.

And it took millions of hours to design it, build it, test it, and get it ready for launch.

I spent about 20 plus years as an engineer working on the telescope, now it's time for the scientists to use it for 20 plus years to make new discoveries, to find out things we don't know yet.

- Normally in a project, if you count up the number of miracles that have to occur, if you get above one, you're in big trouble.

On the Webb, we had 10 technologies that we had to invent just to make our concept doable.

We realized that we had two enormous problems that almost stopped the project dead in its tracks.

This big mirror was bigger in diameter than the biggest rocket that was problem number one.

- This mirror was so big it couldn't even be launched in a rocket, it has to unfold and deploy in space?

- That's right, so Webb's mirrors are huge, they're six and a half meters and so the fairing that we can launch from are about five meters so they're just a little over a meter or two big.

So what we had to do is fold back two sections, one side on the left side, one side on the right side of the mirror so that they can fit into the launch vehicle, kinda standing straight up and down.

- Problem number two is that to build an infrared telescope, the telescope has to be very, very cold because everything above absolute zero emits infrared light.

If we didn't make the JWST cold, it would be blinded by its own infrared emission.

How cold do we have to make it?

Really, really cold, almost -400 Fahrenheit.

The JW sun shield has an SPF of more than a million.

If you had it on the beach, you'd be very well protected and it enables the Webb to achieve this low temperature.

- Most telescopes have a sun shield of sorts.

What you're probably more familiar with are barrels around a telescope that eliminates light from entering the telescopes that's not exactly on axis.

That's what the sun shield on Webb was trying to do.

And so the way that it works was if this light over there is the sun and I wanna look at the dark of space, the sun shield was always shielding the light from the telescope, so my eyes in this case, so that I never see the sun and I can look the other direction into the darkness to look at the first stars and galaxies.

- From its sun shield, which is the size of a tennis court, to the primary mirror which is 21 feet in diameter, the Webb telescope is an engineering marvel.

- Engineering is an empirical science.

You have to build prototypes, test them, see what went wrong, build more prototypes and so forth.

And on the Webb, we were able to do all of that.

One of the things that makes our work difficult is that we have to work in these very, very clean environments wearing special garments.

And this is one of those clean rooms.

This is really one of the largest rooms like this in the world.

You can see the people are wearing these white suits called bunny suits.

And that's because the dirtiest thing in these rooms is the people.

The number of people that can be in the room at any one time is limited.

It's cleaner than the medical operating room, this whole brown wall is a giant HEPA filter.

So the air is constantly flowing horizontally in this room through that filter.

The goal is to remove every single particle in the air that can get into the hardware.

- The James Webb Space Telescope is not like the Hubble which could be repaired in orbit because it's a million miles out.

When the scientists launched Webb, they had one shot to get it right so they implemented of course, extensive testing before it ever left the ground.

- The testing is as important as the flight and so it becomes a constraint on the design.

Every element of design we have to include, how will we test that?

What hardware do we need to test it?

We call it Ground Support Equipment or GSE.

So this is one of the payload areas at Goddard where we're testing space flight hardware and much of the testing we do is done in space simulation chambers that simulate the vacuum and temperature of space.

And so, these large objects are space simulation chambers where space light hardware is being tested as we speak.

These are giant vacuum chambers that simulate the vacuum and temperature and overall environmental conditions of space.

The Webb science instruments were tested here for many, many months to ensure that they would work properly in the Webb mission.

And so to do testing, we have to simulate the environment as best we can here on the earth.

In addition to making sure that the hardware will work in space, we have to make sure that it can survive the rocket flight into space.

So we typically have to simulate that as well.

And these big steel doors are labs that contain giant vibration tables where we will put the payload on the vibration table and shake it to simulate the rocket flight to space.

And we were able to do all of the testing that we needed to do to be confident that this enormously complex thing would actually work.

- Once it was built, the big question was, can it successfully be launched?

- Being in the mission control center with 100 other people that had also poured their hearts and souls into this telescope, the launch was nerve wracking, to say the least.

There still were some risks.

You know we had a lot of single point failures to overcome.

It was also very celebratory because we did have a lot of confidence in our partners at Arianespace to get us up into orbit safely.

- [Announcer] From Jean-Luc Voer, all systems are go.

We're inside a minute now and the command will be issued to ignite the solid rocket boosters.

The James Webb Space Telescope will be on its way.

And we have engine start.

And lift off.

Decollage, lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself, James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.

- Back in the Mission Ops Center in Baltimore, we were kinda like, "Okay, get to work, it's now our time."

We still had six more months of deployments and commissioning to get this thing to do what it's now doing and exceed expectations.

The successful launch, that was just the beginning and now we've turned it over to the science teams to find out what they can with our data.

- There's no one better to talk to about what goes on with this telescope than Kenny McKenzie.

- I had a eighth grade social studies teacher, her name was Christa McAuliffe, she perished in the Challenger disaster and kinda motivated me to enter the space business.

I entered in 1984, I've spent a lot of time with a lot of different missions but beyond all that, this is the most exciting one so far.

Basically, we're on the campus of Johns Hopkins University.

This is the Mueller building.

It's the home of James Webb Science and Data Processing Center and now mission control for James Webb.

During the commissioning and instrument activation phase, both of these two rooms were completely full with probably 100 engineers at any one time.

- So in this room is where the deployment of the mirrors was commanded really.

- We conducted all of the deployment activities from solar array deployment which was the primary and most crucial deployment that we had to do for us to have power.

So the solar array has to come out.

If you don't have a solar array, your mission is basically done.

So that was a very exciting, very positive start to our mission.

- [Myrna] What was the mood in the room at that time?

- [Kenny] It was very, very nervous, of course, as you would fully expect.

People were on their feet, everybody had a job and we all worked very well together and we were able to deploy it perfectly.

- [Announcer] And we have a fully deployed JWST observatory.

(group applauding) - [Crew Member] Yes.

- After 30 days, we were elated.

I mean, we were tired but we were elated.

We had another five and a half months to go with all the instrument commissioning activities but we felt comfortable that all the subsystems were working.

The communications were good.

Beyond all reasonable expectations worked as designed.

- That's incredible.

- It was very incredible.

- [Myrna] It's really just the beginning of a whole new era.

- You know, we're still a baby, we've been up on orbit for just over 12 months.

We continue to explore and develop and uncover amazing items, it's a good time to be part of the Webb program.

- Okay, this is the real time screen of what's happening?

- Yeah, depicted on this screen basically is the view of the observatory as it sits in space.

We use the deep space network which is three different complexes located geographically around the world.

Gives you a visualization of where this observatory and a telescope are pointed.

- So scientists from all over the world are so excited about this data.

How do they use it?

- For each program, it looks at a different part of the sky.

And the longer you stare, the more light that you're actually gonna receive.

Some of these observations may be in the order of two or three hours and some are up to 20, 25, 30 hours.

- [Myrna] So where are we in the process of getting this data?

- We're at the tip of the iceberg.

We were very successful in conserving fuel, so we anticipate having a 20-year fuel budget which will allow us to do imaging and so forth as long as the instruments are able to allow us to take data.

- Over here is actually one of the main places that we align the telescope from.

And up here you can see, we call it the commissioning flow.

These are all the steps that we did to align the telescope over about a three month period.

As we went through the entire process, you know we X'd them all out.

And there's one particular step in the middle there where we got the very first images that were focused and that's why it says champagne because after all those years, that was the moment we knew we built the right telescope.

- Wow, the moment to celebrate?

- The moment to celebrate.

When you look at it from the 20,000 foot level, things went amazingly well, probably better than any of us expected.

And the thing that was really special is that when we got to the final performance, it's almost performing twice as well as we expected.

- [Myrna] So why is this so important to you, Lee?

- These kinds of missions, these missions that bring back amazing images and help us understand how we got here, they inspire.

They inspire young people and I think that's what it's all about.

It shows what human beings are capable of doing when we work together.

And maybe that's a lesson that we can apply to other challenges that we have here on Earth.

- It's so inspiring for science in general.

- We could be learning new physics, physics that then relates to what's happening here on the earth.

We still have a lot of the universe that we don't understand from dark energy to dark matter and the Webb telescope will contribute to that as well.

It's been a little over a year and of course, you know we've come really far in terms of how well it's performing, getting it operating but from a science perspective, we're really just getting going.

From now on, every field is a deep field and that's sort of the way it's been.

This is gonna be a very exciting few years, maybe some of the most exciting few years in the history of understanding our universe.

- The telescope is built, deployed, and the science is rolling in, the data is epic.

So you were the principal investigator for that first batch of images, how were those images received by the public?

- It was a very interesting process, it took us years to prepare for this.

And of course, we had this task of demonstrating to the world that this $10 billion observatory was worth it.

That we could produce something that anybody would look at and say, wow, this gotta be making amazing science.

And that included producing these beautiful color images.

And so, of course, we were worried about that.

We were nervous, I mean, can we actually do that?

We didn't know what the images would look like.

Like this is such a new observatory with such new capabilities, that we could try and predict what we would see but we couldn't really predict it.

And all the data that the observatory takes really is the property of the world.

And so, eventually it all becomes public and anybody can download the data and you don't even have to be a scientist to download the images and look at them.

- So Klaus, you saw the first images as they were coming down from this telescope.

- Right, I saw the first color images, the first science images that we took, the ones you've seen.

For example, the cosmic cliffs or the first deep field.

The primary feeling I had was really of loneliness because the first image came down, it was sort of late at night.

I didn't download it here in the office, I actually downloaded it in my basement at home.

So I was sitting there this evening in my basement all alone and I was looking at this image of the deepest view of the universe that anybody had seen and it was profound loneliness because I couldn't share it with anybody.

- So the colors are gorgeous and what do they mean?

- So the colors mean something physically.

So when we pick a filter, what that does is it actually picks out a signature of a specific molecule or a specific element.

So here I have pulled up an image that uses a filter that sees organic molecules.

So 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system looked like that.

All this stuff around you see here, that's the organic material that we are made of that ends up on the planets in there.

- [Myrna] It makes me feel like I'm part of the universe.

- Oh, you are very much part of the universe, right?

As Carl Sagan said, "We're the universe's way of thinking about itself."

- So we're starting to get this data now, is it creating more questions than answers?

- Oh yes, it's creating more questions than answers, absolutely.

And I think that's where we want to be, right?

If we are starting to run out of questions, we are not doing something right, that's not how science works.

We wanna answer questions but we want to make more questions than we have answers.

There'll be future telescopes because we need that to answer all those new questions we have.

- You and so many people have dedicated their careers to this project.

How does it feel now that it's up and it's running so well?

- It's performing better than expected across the board.

And that is true in terms of its lifetime expectancy, and its optical performance is about a factor of two better than the expected performance.

How stable it is when it looks at an image is about a factor of seven better than expectations.

So yeah, it's incredible to see how well it's performing up there.

- One of the great things about science is that we learn new things and often those new things that we learn overturn a previous idea.

That's certainly gonna be the case with the James Webb Space Telescope.

It sees the universe so much more clearly, so much deeper, I think there's some big surprises in store that James Webb will give us.

- The Webb is giving humanity its very first high definition view of the infrared universe and the view is fantastic.

- The great thing that I took away from Webb and being part of this project is helping to build something that fundamentally contributes to humanity's knowledge.

- My dream is to continue trying to do hard things.

I love the idea that I've gotten to work with a team that has enabled the science classes that my kids will take aren't going to be the same science classes I took.

That's very exciting.

- Building the first segmented space telescope, this is sort of like landing on the moon for telescopes in a sense that it's the first of a kind but a segmented telescope is scalable.

We can build bigger and bigger.

And then after that, we can think about assembling telescopes that are made up of segments like this.

And that's what we're gonna need someday if we wanna take an image of a planet just like Earth around another star in high definition.

The Webb telescope is the first step on that journey.

- With its successful launch and deployment, Webb is expected to support scientific observation for about 20 years unveiling the secrets of the universe one discovery at a time.

All of us at Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum look forward to uncovering more mysteries beyond our planet and sharing them with you.

We'll see you next time on "Behind the Wings".

(bright upbeat music)