The James Webb Space Telescope

By now we've all seen the stunning images released July 14 of some of the first photographs taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, designed and sent into space to observe, from nearly a million miles outside of Earth's orbit around the Sun, other galaxies and objects in space that are beyond the capability of anything as yet designed.

I won't even pretend to understand the mechanics and physics of the whole thing, it's far beyond my pay grade and scientific education. I will share with you the somewhat understandable idea that the aim of the telescope is to conduct "infrared astronomy," which is to say its design and sensitivity give it a far greater range than anything yet launched for the purpose - allowing it to "see" objects too old, distant, or faint for the next best space telescope, the Hubble, to see.

What also surprised me, when talking with people about their observations of those newly released photos, was their reactions. My first reaction was, I will admit, artistic. I was surprised that the stars scattered across one particularly stunning image looked as if they had been painted by a religious painter of the early Renaissance - they showed the star with a glowing center and a cross of light tapering to the tops and sides of many of the stars. The classic “cross” image of a star in God’s heaven.

Yet another person's reaction was: "How could there possibly not be life on other planets? Look at how many more galaxies there are than we'd ever thought!"

And another reminded us that "It's like time travel - what we're looking at happened so long ago!" And, in fact, the JWST can detect objects 100 times fainter than the Hubble can, and objects that "were" much earlier in the universe - about 180 million years cosmic time after the Big Bang. 

Problems that the JWST aims to help with include such obvious ground-based telescope issues as having to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere to gaze out into space; the use of infrared technology to "see through" space dust; the ability of infrared to observe objects that are colder and thus emit more energy in the infrared range; and the ability to observe "unplanned" targets to within 48 hours of their appearance (which might be a long, long time ago in "our" time). 

That point of observation noted earlier, by way of contrast, is quite stunning in an of itself. If old telescopes were based on Earth, the Hubble orbits approximately 340 miles above the earth's surface. The Moon is about 250,000 miles from Earth - and now consider again that the JWST is hovering about 1 million miles beyond the Earth's orbit around the Sun. That's way out there, and thus will be "looking at" things we simply could not see before, which of course will bring up for new investigation everything we've "known" about outer space until now. 

A challenge with infrared telescopes includes that they must stay extremely cold - the longer the wavelength of infrared, the colder they must be. The device itself will generate heat, and that heat can interfere with the detectors, rendering it "blind." Thus far, the design of this new telescope promises to bring back images that may change much of what science has thus far learned about space, time, life, its forms and origins.

At this time, there is no way to visit the telescope, repair it, or perform other routine maintenance or retooling. Come to think of it, a little godlike, that - launch your creation and see what happens next.