Transcript:
Captain Janet:
Welcome to the JP AstroCast, where we are traveling at the speed of thought. Today's episode is brought to you by Hunt Brothers Pizza. Ah, Eyezak, what are you doing?
Eyezak:
Hey, Captain Janet. I'm just hanging up some pictures on these walls. New crew, new beginnings, new surroundings.
Captain Janet:
But Eyezak, you're using nails?
Isaac:
How else would I hang a picture?
Captain Janet:
Well, I don't know, but you don't put nails in a spaceship. That might puncture our hull, and then we would lose oxygen, and we need that to breathe.
Eyezak:
Oh, didn't think of that. Hmm.
Captain Janet:
Did you just hang that picture up with your chewing gum?
Isaac:
Yep. Problem fixed. Right.
Captain Janet:
You know, this post-it was supposed to be something entirely different, so okay.
Eyezak:
That ought to do it. Do you think our new crew will like my decorations?
Captain Janet:
I'm sure they'll love it, Eyezak.
Eyezak
Okay. Do you think they'll like me?
Captain Janet:
Of course, they will. Everybody loves you.
Eyezak:
Usually, but these kids are super genius smart. They read lots of books and do experiments and want to do awesome things in space. What if they don't think I'm smart enough to hang out with them?
Captain Janet:
Eyezak,I am sure they will love you. And here they come now.
Kid 1:
Hello.
Kid 2:
Hey everybody.
Captain Jane:
Glad you guys are here.
Captain Janet:
All right, crew. Welcome to Janet's planet and happy to have you aboard. First, unpack your gear in your cabins and then meet Eyezak and me in the galley for some lunch. And then we'll beam up Dr. John Grunsfeld to speak about his work on the Hubble telescope and the newest thing in space, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Maggie:
That's amazing.
Captain Janet:
See Eyezak, was that so bad? They're really cool and super accepting kids. I know new beginnings are tough, but you're going to be just fine. And one of the esteemed JP space crew.
Isaac:
Oh, I sure hope so. I hope I don't ask Dr. Grunsfeld any not-smart questions.
Captain Janet:
Oh, Isaac. Here's the thing. There are never any not-smart questions. Now let's just go get ready for lunch. Remember it's Hunt Brothers Pizza today.
Isaac:
Oh, my favorite! Hunt Brothers Pizza is proud to support the JP AstroCast with over 8,000 locations in convenience stores near you, finding a Hunt Brothers Pizza is easy as pie. Choose between Hunt Brothers Pizza's original crust or thin crust. And top your pizza with any of our 10 toppings at no extra charge. With that many options, there's sure to be a topping combo for everyone to enjoy a Hunt Brothers Pizza.
Captain Janet:
All right, everyone. Quiet, please. I would like to introduce our guest today. He is fittingly an astronaut and astronomer. Dr. John Grunsfeld hails from Highland Park, Illinois, received a Bachelor of Science Degree in physics from MIT, a Master of Science Degree, and a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in physics from the University of Chicago. Dr. Grunsfeld has four NASA space flight medals, three NASA exceptional service medals, a NASA distinguished service medal, and many other special honors.
Captain Janet:
Dr. Grunsfeld was selected by NASA in March 1992 and reported to the Johnson Space Center in August 1992. A veteran of four space flights, Dr. Grunsfeld has logged over 45 days in space, including five spacewalks, totaling 37 hours and 32 minutes. During STS 1 0 3, Dr. Grunsfeld and his crew installed new gyroscopes and scientific instruments and upgraded systems on the Hubble space telescope, which required three spacewalks. STS 1 0 9 successfully upgraded the Hubble space telescope, installing a new digital camera, a cooling system for the infrared camera, new solar arrays, and a new power system.
Captain Janet:
Those upgrades required a total of five spacewalks in five consecutive days. He's watched Hubble drift against the background of earth and stars. And he's guided new parts and instruments into the telescope and left it whole and healthy. He has helped the science missions of Hubble and envisioned science goals for the James Webb space telescope. And is now an Emeritus scientist at Godard Space Flight Center, working on Hubble observations of Jupiter's moon, Europa, and collaborating on the design of the next generation of space. serviceable telescopes. Dr. John Grunsfeld, what an honor to have you beam up today?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
Well, it's absolutely a pleasure to be on. I'm excited because we are on the cusp of an astronomical revolution. And for me, my telescope is the Hubble space telescope. And what's interesting is about a third to a half of everybody who lives on planet earth has always lived in a world with the Hubble space telescope. And that's because it's been in orbit for 31 years coming up on 32. Your telescope though will be the James Webb space telescope. And you'll be learning about the new universe that the James Webb Space Telescope sees over the coming years. So thanks for having me on board.
Evy:
How or when did you know you wanted to be an astronomer and an astronaut?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
When I was born, 1958, I know that's a long time ago, but there were no astronauts. In fact, the very world's first satellite had just been launched a year before, but as I was going to elementary school, we started sending astronauts off into space. First, there was the Mercury program where one astronaut would go into space at a time in a Mercury capsule. Then Gemini. And that's what I remember are the Gemini missions where two people at a time would go and then the Apollo missions to the moon. And I thought that was all exciting.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
So about age six or seven, I was already a young scientist. I was interested in fossils and dinosaurs and insects. But once we moved out of the city lights, I started seeing the night sky and that's when I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. And my grandmother at that time gave me a small telescope. And I started looking at the planets and the stars. That's when I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. And it came from looking up at the stars and wondering if there were other planets out there that had people. Well, whatever people would be, aliens.
Eyezak:
Aliens! Well, I would think that my presence would more than confirm that question.
Captain Janet:
Yes. Maggie?
Maggie:
I just wanted to say what I thought was kind of interesting is my grandma gave me a telescope too, a few years ago for Christmas. So, that was cool.
Captain Janet:
Really? How old were you?
Maggie:
I think over three years ago.
Captain Janet:
That is pretty cool.
Lucas:
What is it like working on Hubble?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
Oh, I love working on the Hubble space telescope. As you know, the Hubble space telescope was designed to be serviced. And that means to be fixed by people in space suits with the big gloves. First of all, doing a spacewalk is just the coolest thing anyway. You get to put on a spacesuit, you get to go outside of the space shuttle or space station and float around in your own spaceship, the suit that wraps around you. You get to see the earth just through your thin visor. So, that's really fun. Plus I'm an astronomer. And so we love telescopes. So I got to be the one to fix the Hubble space telescope. And some of the things we did were really hard. And so we had to figure out new tools and new ways of fixing things in orbit.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
Here on planet Earth, I get to use the Hubble space telescope to observe, and that's not as much fun as working on the Hubble up in space because you put in a proposal and NASA approves it, and then you get your observations. It's basically downloading the data from a server. So you don't really get to play with the Hubble at all, but then you get the cool science and you get to see pictures of your Europa. And Jupiter. And that's pretty cool.
Eyezak:
Look, look, do you have a favorite image from Hubble?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
I have a bunch of favorite images from Hubble because I went up three times to fix the Hubble space telescope. And my favorite image each time is the first image that Hubble takes. In the case of my first mission in 1999, it was the Eskimo Nebula. In 2002, it was an image called the Tadpole.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
The Eskimo Nebula is a star that's dying. And as it dies, it kind of has these temper tantrums and flows off its outer envelope. And then that glows. And so this particular image looks kind of like an Eskimo in his big parka. The Tadpole is a picture of two galaxies that have collided and they're circling around each other and have thrown out a long tail of material. And in that long tail of gas and dust, new stars are for me.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
And on this most recent mission, it was a picture taken a little later, but my favorite image is an image that widefield camera three, the new super-duper digital camera on Hubble, took of the Orion Nebula, the great Nebula, and Orion. And the reason I like these images so much is that it proves that we fixed the telescope and didn't break it. If we got home and they turned the telescope on and it couldn't take images anymore, I'd feel terrible.
Kevin:
I heard if the James Webb telescope doesn't deploy everything as it should. There's something you can make it do. I think it was called the shimmy?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
The James Webb space telescope isn't really assembled completely when we launch it. And that's because it has to be folded up so that it fits in the rocket faring inside the rocket. And once the rocket's launched, it's like a transformer or undoing an origami or both, that it has to slowly unfold and pieces have to come out before it can be a real telescope. There are I think, 40 different mechanisms and 600 pulleys and 150 motors, and 178 individual actuators.
Maggie:
That's amazing.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
And it's incredibly complex for all these things to work. And so if something like the secondary mirror, there's the big mirror, and then there's a little mirror above it. If that doesn't unfold all the way, they can't send me out to give it a shake or to pull it. Astronauts can't go near the telescope. We don't have the capability, but also it's too delicate.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
And so what you can do is kind of drive the motors or use the spacecraft to shake it while you're trying to drive the motor and see if you can redeploy it. And so, we'll try everything and anything to make sure everything deploys.
Evy:
How long will take to unfold?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
It's going to unfold in pieces. The very first thing that will unfold, which is actually just a few hours after launch are the solar panels. So you can see on Hubble, there are those big solar panels. Well, we actually put those on ourselves and then unfolded them. So just after launch a few hours after it separates from the launch vehicle, the solar panels will unfold. That'll give it the power it needs to drive all those other motors. Then a few days later, they'll start to unfold the sunshade, and this will be about the size of a tennis court. And so over the course of about two weeks, most of the deployments will be done, but it'll take about a full month before everything is fully deployed because they want to go slow and carefully.
Captain Janet:
How soon will we be able to get an image from the J W S T?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
I don't know exactly what it is, but it's going to be a few months. And that's because not only does James Webb have to deploy, but it has 18 mirrors and those mirrors are aligned to make one big mirror. So they have to go through individually and adjust each mirror so that it works as one mirror and not 18 individual mirrors. And so it's going to take a few days for each mirror while they turn it, adjust it and maybe bend it until the whole telescope works as one.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
So probably there'll be some really bad images that'll come out in about three months. I'm not even sure if NASA will show those, but probably they will. And over the next couple of months, those images will sharpen up until they're as good as Hubble. And, and that'll be at about six months. So commissioning of the telescope, which means making sure everything works takes about six months.
Eyezak:
How does the sun shield work?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
The sun shield works like an umbrella. If it's a really bright sunny day and you forgot a hat, because you thought it was going to rain, you can always open your umbrella and use it as a sun shield. And so it works just like that. The problem is with a spacecraft is, there is some space junk out there. And if the space junk goes through your umbrella, there'd be a hole in it. And the sun would go through that hole. So in order to prevent that the James Webb space telescope actually has five layers in its umbrella in its sun shield so that if one layer gets punctured, it won't let the light through all the way to the telescope. The other effect of having those five layers is for thermal reasons, not just blocking the sunlight, but on the sunny side of the James Webb Space Telescope, it's about 200 degrees, really hot.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
And with each subsequent layer, it acts like a Thermos bottle. So that on the cold side, the part that faces where the James Webb space telescope will be looking, the temperature will be about minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit, just 40 degrees above absolute zero. And so the sun shield does two things. One, it just blocks the light. You can't see the stars in the daytime and that's because the earth is so bright, the Hubble is so bright, that the camera had to be set to an exposure. And the same is true of our eyeballs that you can't see stars. You need to be at night to see stars so that you can have that sensitivity. The same is true for James Webb. So it has to block the sunlight. That's the main purpose. And the secondary purpose is to allow the telescope to get super cold so that it can see the very faint light from the early universe.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
The James Webb space telescope will do so much more than looking back at the very early universe. It will also study the formation of stars, the formation of galaxies, and the time history of galaxies all the way up to the present. It'll look at planets in our own solar system. I'm really excited because one of its first targets will be Europa, around Jupiter, to look to see if it can see those plumes. And then the other big thing that James Webb is going to do is just going to look at the atmospheres of planets around nearby stars so that we can see if there's another planet out there that kind of looks like Earth. So I'm pretty excited about that too.
Eyezak:
I'm a little embarrassed to ask, but why is it called the James Webb Space Telescope?
Captain Janet:
Oh, you don't have to be embarrassed. Eyezak. Dr. Grunsfeld, could you please tell our young crew a bit more about James Webb?
Dr. Grunsfeld:
James Webb was the first, well, one of the first directors, we call them administrators, of NASA. And so he was in charge of trying to get people to the moon and back. But another thing that he did that people don't know a lot about is that he made sure that science was part of NASA and that it was a big part of NASA. And that astronauts would go to the moon and do science. And so in recognition of his contributions to scientific investigations of space, the NASA administrator in 2004, named the telescope after James Webb. So that's why it's called the James Webb space telescope.
Captain Janet:
I am excited about this new beginning. In reality, when you look through a telescope as an astronomer, a telescope is almost like a cosmic time machine. It's allowing you to see the past in part because of the way that light travels. Can you speak to how, whenever you look up at the stars on a starlet night that we're seeing into the past?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
So how many of you have seen a bolt of lightning? And then five seconds later, you hear the thunder, right? Pretty much all of us, right? Why does the thunder take so long to get to us when we see the light almost right away?
Ander:
It's because light goes faster than sound.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
Right. The speed of sound through the air is really pretty slow. It travels about a thousand feet every second. Whereas the speed of light goes 186,000 miles per second. And so the light comes to us really quick, whereas the sound takes longer, but light still has a speed. And that means when we look at the sun, for instance, or you don't look at the sun. When sunlight reaches us, it took about eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth because it's 93 million miles away. Well, the sun is really close compared to the nearest star. It takes four years for the light to get to us from the nearest star, off of Centauri.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
It takes millions of years for light to get from a galaxy to us. And the light that James Webb is going to look at will have taken at the very most distant, will have taken about 13 and a half billion years to get to us. And so when we look at some fuzzy galaxy, that was one of the first galaxies that ever assembled in the universe, the light that left that galaxy will have traveled for 13 and a half billion years to get to us. And that means when we see that light, we're looking at that galaxy as it was when it was just a baby galaxy. And so that allows us to look back in time, really because we have no other choice, it just took that long for the light to get to us.
Evy:
How long will the James Web telescope work?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
Good question. It was designed to last at least five years. And we think if we operate it really carefully, it will last for about 10 or 11 years. And that's just because that's how much fuel it has onboard.
Captain Janet:
I will point out that NASA is notorious for underestimating the longevity of its hardware, like spirit or opportunity, both outlasted, original projections by a long shot.
Speaker 8:
You said that, in five to 10 years that the James Webb telescope will run out of fuel. Is there any chance that NASA will send any refueling missions to keep the satellite operating for longer?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
It's possible. Right now, there are no plans, but when was in charge of the James Webb space telescope project, I insisted that they put some little details on the telescope. There are like targets so that a robot spacecraft would know where to grab if we did send a refueling spacecraft out there, but right now there are no plans to do that. I hope in the next five years or so, that refueling technology and capability and space will advance to the point where that seems like a very reasonable thing to do.
Maggie:
Do you think it'll answer the cosmic question of, "Are we alone?"
Eyezak:
Huh? Yeah. I'm getting really tired of people thinking I live on some made-up street in New York City. No one believes I'm a real alien.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
Okay. We're here on earth and we are building these telescopes and we now know that virtually every star you look at in the night sky has planets around it. When I was growing up, we didn't know that I suspected there might be, but we didn't have any scientific proof. Now we have proof that other solar systems are out there. It just seems so likely that if there's life on earth, life should have started somewhere else. If life is a one in a million chance on a planet, there are 200 billion stars in our own galaxy, which means there are at least that many planets. Then there should be lots and lots of life. But if life is a one in a trillion chance, we might be the only life in the whole galaxy. And we just don't know. So that's one of the things that the James Webb space telescope is going to try to look at planets around nearby stars to see if we see atmospheres that could be habitable.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
So if there's another planet, even if it's close and they put as much pollution in their atmospheres as we put in ours, there's a tiny chance we might detect that, but probably not. That's going to take a telescope that's a little bit bigger than the James Webb. I think that that question will be answered when we send a probe to Europa or Enceladus, or maybe on Mars, you'll find a microbial fossil, or maybe even a live Martian microbe when you're on Mars. Or with a next-generation telescope beyond James Webb, something that instead of being 20 feet across is 30 or 35 feet across, a 16-meter telescope might be able to answer that question.
Captain Janet:
Wow. Thank you so much, Dr. Grunsfeld, for beaming up to the JP spaceship to speak with our crew.
Speaker 3:
Thank you.
Speaker 4:
Thank you, Mr. Grunsfeld.
Eyezak:
Thank you.
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
My pleasure.
Captain Janet:
We had a great time speaking with you. Would you consider coming back again?
Dr. John Grunsfeld:
Sure. My pleasure.
Eyezak:
Wow! Smart and brave and nice?
Captain Janet:
He truly is a gem. And speaking of gems, let's talk about the newest gem that NASA has launched, the James Webb telescope. December 25th, 2021 may become known as the day. The universe changed from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. Congratulations to the many amazing humans at NASA, the European space agency, the Canadian space agency, and Arian space. Listen to the launch countdown from Kuru, Guyana, and an excited Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA science mission directorate, talk about the joy of watching 20 plus years of work finally take flight.
ESA Mission Control Manager:
[foreign language 00:23:53].
NASA:
We have lift off.
Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen:
Whenever we look at launches, they're both an ending in the beginning. They're an ending of an engineering project on the ground and with many amazing hours and challenges that are there. But they're a beginning. JWST is the beginning of one of the most amazing missions that humanity has conceived. And I'm so excited to look forward to the next setup of this telescope and all the signs to come. Thanks to everybody. This is what we can do when we come together as one, humans. It's just absolutely incredible.
Captain Janet:
I love Dr. Zurbuchen's sentiment, that the engineering marble that is the James Webb telescope, is what can happen when we all come together for space exploration. 100 times more powerful than the 31-year-old Hubble telescope, Webb can see back in time, all the way to the let there be light moment. That instant when a cold dark universe ignited into stars and Webb, made perchance, put an end to some of our biggest cosmic questions. We just can't wait to see the James Webb space telescope unfold the universe for all of us.
Captain Janet:
So you see Eyezak, just like with the JWST, new beginnings can be scary, but they are also exciting.
Eyezak:
You're right. I'm excited to explore the universe with this awesome new crew.
Captain Janet:
Thank you, everyone. For listening to the JP AstroCast, let your mind revolve around this thought.
Eyezak:
The universe is always expanding.
Captain Janet:
Let your mind do the same.
Captain Janet and EyezaK:
And that's the view from the JP AstroCast.
The JP ASTROCAST, a galaxy of fun.
