NASA has just released the first pictures
from the new James Webb Space Telescope.
These images,
containing starlight more ancient than any ever seen before,
herald a new age of discovery.
It's the largest space telescope we've ever built.
We're going to make discoveries which we never anticipated.
It's one of NASA's most challenging missions since the moon landings.
Webb is on par with Apollo.
Just the size of it, the complexity, the reach.
The telescope will probe the furthest reaches of our universe.
But it's like Hubble on steroids.
Hubble opened up the deep universe for us.
Well, the James Webb Telescope is going to go even deeper.
It will look back in time to the birth of light.
There will be moments where we could actually look back
to the first stars.
Let me say that again, the first stars turning on,
that's what we're going to try to see.
It will explore beyond our solar system,
to reveal the secrets of distant planets.
This is mind-boggling.
We can actually look at these planets
and maybe actually find life out there.
We're going to see the universe in a whole new way
that we've never seen it before.
It has taken over 30 years,
£8 billion
and the work of over 10,000 people
to create the most advanced telescope ever built.
If Hubble rewrote the textbooks once,
James Webb will rewrite them again.
So, be ready for a brand-new universe.
Los Angeles, 26th of September, 2021.
In a secret operation, a specially designed container
carrying the James Webb Space Telescope
begins the long journey to the launch site in South America.
Security is tight.
The telescope is the most expensive scientific instrument ever built.
Waiting anxiously at a nearby harbour
is the man overseeing the entire Webb Space Telescope programme,
Greg Robinson.
It's been about 20 years and about $10 billion.
But the global impact that this mission is going to have...
It's hard to put dollars on it.
It's quite nerve-racking.
Astronomers hope this telescope will change the way
we view the universe.
NASA built it to fulfil a dream that began in the last century.
Over Christmas in 1995,
the astronomers in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope
took an extraordinary photo.
What they did is they actually looked at a piece of empty space,
and it was deliberately chosen to be a piece of empty space,
because what they wanted to do was get a really long exposure
and see what was out there.
It looked for ten whole days.
And when the images started to come back,
that tiny piece of space turned out to have lots of stars and galaxies.
It was amazing.
This was an image that just blew away all of us astronomers.
This was the deepest image ever, up to that time, of our universe.
The image is known as the Hubble Deep Field.
It shows about 3,000 galaxies.
Astronomers realised they were seeing the distant galaxies
as they existed a very long time ago.
When we look out to space, we're also looking at time.
And that's because light takes a finite time
to travel through space.
Light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second,
which is pretty incredibly fast.
It's the fastest thing we know of,
yet even that is finite.
And so it takes time for the light from the object we're looking at
to get to us.
Light from the most distant objects Hubble can see
takes around 13 billion years to reach us.
This means we are seeing them as they were
a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
But that's where our observations with Hubble stop.
Just a little further back in time,
the first stars and galaxies were born.
It's frustrating. These objects are just out of the range
of the Hubble Space Telescope.
So even though we may be only going back,
say, half a billion years more,
that's when that first generation of stars turned on.
Astronomers desperately want to know what happened
in the early years of the universe.
How were the first stars and galaxies created?
We're talking about the beginning of history
and there's a natural curiosity to understand,
how did it all get started?
We can make all the models in the world and we can write
lots of papers and we can say,
well, if it's like this or if it's like that,
but at the end of the day, you just got to go look.
In the 1980s, before Hubble had even launched,
a small group of scientists among the staff
of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland,
began working on ideas for its successor.
Peter Stockman was on the team.
Our director said, you know, "You need to start thinking
"about what the next telescope is going to be like,
"even before this one launches."
So we invited a bunch of astronomers and engineers
and people from all over NASA
to give talks about what they would imagine the telescope to be.
Ideas included a telescope on the moon
and several in space.
But it was the Hubble image of distant galaxies
that would truly shape the telescope's design.
When the Hubble Deep Field came out,
people realised, my gosh,
if we can do this with Hubble
and we had a telescope with even more resolution,
we can look way far back.
And that, really, was the target for the Webb telescope,
to look at the earliest formation of stars and galaxies.
To see the very first stars and galaxies in the universe
will require an incredibly powerful telescope.
It will need to be placed in space,
above the Earth's atmosphere,
which blocks most of the starlight they're trying to see.
And it will have to be large.
With telescopes, it's all about how big it is.
The bigger it is, usually the crisper the image is
and the more sensitive it is.
When astronomers say a big telescope,
they mean a big main mirror.
The larger the mirror, the more photons,
the more light that you collect.
And when you're trying to look at things that are really dim,
you need a really big telescope to collect more photons.
Before Webb, the largest mirror NASA had launched into space
was in the Hubble Space Telescope.
It's a solid piece of glass, 2.4 metres in diameter.
But for the James Webb Space Telescope,
astronomers want a mirror 6.5 metres across.
This is too wide to fit inside the largest rocket available.
In 1995,
it was a challenging problem
for the telescope's first engineer, Pierre Bely.
So, this is a school notebook,
but I used it to keep track of all the discussion
that we had and the concept.
This is the first picture of our very elementary design
of our telescope, and it's made of petals,
which are foldable like a flower,
so that they can be folded during launch
and opened up once it's in space.
By 2002, the design had evolved.
Instead of a single glass mirror, like Hubble,
Webb's engineers decided to use 18 hexagonal segments.
On the back of each one,
they will install seven motors to move the segment,
so that all 18 can be aligned
to focus light like a single giant mirror.
Motors fold the mirror's sides,
so it fits into the rocket that will take it to space.
September, 2003.
Work begins building the telescope,
now named James Webb,
after the NASA director who led the 1960s race to the moon.
Shaping the giant segments of the largest mirror
ever sent into space is an engineering challenge.
Jay Daniel leads the team that must make them precisely the right shape.
The challenge is we have 18 different hexagonal segments
that form up the primary mirror.
And so you need the curve of the entire surface
to be as near perfect as possible.
The segments are made of a lightweight metal called beryllium.
To shape them, engineers had to develop new technology.
You see these very large machines behind me here?
These were custom-designed and built to process the James Webb mirrors.
The machines must polish a smooth curve.
Any bumps must be smaller than 1/5,000th
of the width of a human hair.
If the mirror was the size of the United States,
we'd be talking about bumps that were a few centimetres,
a few inches tall.
You know, awfully smooth!
Even with eight new machines,
it takes Jay's team two-and-a-half years
to polish perfect surfaces on all 18 mirrors.
If they get it right, the mirrors will reflect pin-sharp images
of distant galaxies into the James Webb Space Telescope.
But to see deeper into space
and further back in time than Hubble,
the telescope also needs to detect light that Hubble can't see.
Before the launch of Webb,
the oldest object we'd seen is this,
Galaxy GN-z11.
This is just a tiny little dot of light
at the limit of our instruments.
And we actually found that it was 400 million years
after the Big Bang.
And, so, that means we're looking back in time 13.4 billion years,
13,400 million years of time, to see this object.
But this tantalising glimpse is as far as Hubble can see.
To see further, Webb must detect a type of light
invisible to the human eye.
That's because light from very distant galaxies
changes on its long journey through space.
Ever since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding.
Light from the first stars has been travelling
through this expanding universe for billions of years.
As space expands, the wavelength of the light passing through it
gets longer...
..which means the colour of the light shifts towards the red end
of the light spectrum.
As the light becomes redder and redder,
it eventually moves from being visible
into the invisible infrared.
So, starlight that could have begun as visible light,
travelling for billions of years across the expansion
of the universe, it's now stretched out into infrared.
So, if you go into the infrared,
you can see many, many of these distant, long-ago objects.
To see the first stars and galaxies, the James Webb Space Telescope
must be able to detect that infrared light.
Although we can't see it,
infrared light is all around us.
We can actually feel infrared light. It's a heat energy.
So, the sun, for instance, gives out visible light,
but it also gives out infrared and we can feel it on our skin.
So, although we can't see this light, we can feel it.
But, also, we can make sensors that can actually pick up this light,
which is very useful in astronomy.
This is where you can actually see things in the dark.
And now an entirely different universe lights up
because by warm, we mean basically anything with any temperature,
things that are incredibly cold to humans,
things that are hundreds of degrees below zero.
You could actually see the glow.
Getting an infrared telescope to work in space
is a huge challenge.
The telescope will be exposed to the full glare of the sun,
which will cause it to heat up
and give off its own infrared radiation.
This would drown out the much fainter infrared light
coming from distant galaxies.
For the telescope to work, engineers must find a way
to make it extremely cold.
They have one thing on their side.
Although the sun is hot,
space itself is cold.
Basically, you know, the universe is a giant refrigerator.
So if you put something out there and you shield it from the sun,
it's going to get cold.
The temperature of space where they will send Webb
is -266 Celsius.
Only seven degrees above absolute zero.
So if the Webb's engineers design a large parasol to reflect the heat
of the sun away,
temperatures on the dark side should drop dramatically.
But making this vast sunshield is one of the biggest challenges
of the whole project.
The sunshield is probably the most complex, from a design standpoint.
It has to keep one side of the telescope extremely cold,
pretty close to absolute zero,
and very warm on the other side.
The side of the shield that faces the sun will get almost as hot
as boiling water.
The cold side must remain cooler than liquid nitrogen.
The whole mission depends on the sunshield design working.
Huntsville, Alabama.
In August 2013, construction begins on the giant sunshield.
Mike Helba is the manufacturer's chief scientist.
The design actually is very complex.
It can't be just an insulating blanket.
Part of the design of the sunshield,
it allows the heat to radiate out into space.
To shade the entire telescope,
the sunshield will have to be enormous,
about the size of a tennis court.
To block almost all the sun's heat,
it will need to be made of five layers of reflective material,
so heat that passes through one layer
will be reflected out the sides by the next.
The only way to get it into space is to fold it up.
But, once there, it will have to unfold.
The riskiest operation of the whole mission.
The sunshield material needs to be extremely thin
so it can be folded many times to make it small.
But it also needs to be strong enough not to snag or tear
when it unfolds.
NASA uses a space-age polymer called Kapton.
It's thinner than a human hair but almost as strong as steel.
So, that one pulled 37.9 lb. Pretty good.
A special pink silicone coating on the layer of the sunshield
that faces the sun will reflect about 90% of the sun's heat.
The next four layers must reflect the remaining heat out of the sides.
This way, all five layers should progressively cool
the telescope.
To direct the heat out of the sides,
the sunshield layers must be closer together in the middle
than at the edges.
This means that each layer must have a slightly different shape.
The material comes in rolls that are about four foot wide.
So we cut them to shape on our cutting table.
And they're seamed together into the shape of the sunshield.
You have to be careful, because it's thin. It can tear.
The membrane pieces are cut flat.
But they're designed so that when they're welded together, they take
on a three-dimensional shape.
The team spends the next three years manufacturing all five layers
of the sunshield.
Cooled to its operating temperature,
the James Webb Telescope will allow astronomers to explore
the mysterious time that lies beyond the reach of Hubble.
LOUD BANG
It's a time that starts a few hundred million years
after the Big Bang.
You get the Big Bang, and the universe then cools
for quite a while.
And from a scientist's perspective, it's really boring.
There's nothing to see, because light doesn't get out.
And then something changes.
Parts of the universe are able to cool enough
that matter is able to condense and form the first stars.
Approximately 13.6 billion years ago,
out of the darkness came light.
But no-one knows exactly how those first stars were born.
In the dark, cooling universe, the only elements that existed
were those formed in the Big Bang.
Hydrogen, helium and a small amount of lithium.
The scientists' working theory is that giant clouds of these gases
collapsed under their own gravity to create the first stars.
But no-one has seen them.
They weren't stars like we know stars.
Stars have evolved over time.
These early stars were made out of the matter
that was around in the universe, and that was mainly
hydrogen and helium.
From our understanding they were huge,
maybe 100 times the mass of our sun.
We think those were probably pretty big stars and we think they probably
didn't last very long, that they were very bright
and then blew themselves up very quickly.
Astrophysicists think the intense temperatures and pressures
inside the first stars transformed hydrogen and helium into a host
of new chemical elements.
When the stars died, their powerful supernova explosions created
even more elements.
From these first stars came the materials to build planets,
including the Earth.
The chemistry of the universe hasn't changed much since that first era.
So what that means is that pretty much everything around us happened
right at the start.
There must have been this incredibly intense era of star formation, maybe
giant stars, everything blowing up.
That's what we're looking for.
Think about how profound that is.
With the James Webb Space Telescope,
we're seeing the first stars come to light,
that initial creation
of the elements that lead to things like life.
Redondo Beach, Los Angeles, California.
Here, in a vast clean room, engineers are attempting to unfold
a prototype sunshield.
No-one has ever unfolded a telescope in space before.
It makes this one of NASA's most ambitious missions
since the moon landings.
Webb is on par with Apollo, just the size of it, the complexity,
the reach, scope and so on.
We do a lot of complex, hard missions, and this one is certainly
at the top of that list of complexity.
The engineering team must find a way to unfold the vast sunshield
in space without humans touching it.
Their plan is to use a remote-controlled system
of intricate cables, motors and pulleys.
You know, you're going to need to tension it with some form of cables,
cos this has to start off soft and foldable and then pull
to a taut, you know, tension kind of thing.
They've managed to make it work on Earth.
But in space it will be a high-risk operation.
And the risk is even greater because of where they will position Webb.
They will send the telescope to a location known as the second
Lagrange point, a gravitational sweet spot that helps hold
the spacecraft in position.
Here, it will travel around the sun at the same speed as the Earth
in a special orbit.
In this orbit, the heat from the sun, Earth and moon
always hits the telescope on the same side and can be blocked
with the giant sunshield.
But this position is extremely remote,
four times further away from the Earth than the moon.
Too far to send a repair mission if anything goes wrong.
It's going to be very stressful when we do an on-orbit,
cos it's away from us, cos we can't touch it, right,
cos we can only command the motors.
It's quite nerve-racking, yes.
Webb would be a million miles away.
So it's pretty far out there for humans with our current capability.
It's not designed for repair.
The team building the James Webb Space Telescope only has one chance
to get it right.
It's an £8 billion roll of the dice.
September 2012.
The first mirror segments arrive
at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The polished mirrors have all been coated in a thin layer of gold,
to better reflect infrared light.
When all the mirrors have arrived, a robot arm fits them to the carbon
composite frame that will hold them together.
After a two-month operation, workers fix the final mirror into place.
In February 2016,
the six-and-a-half-metre-wide primary mirror is finally complete.
This large, high-precision mirror will revolutionise our view
of the universe.
With it, Webb may even detect life on another world.
Planets outside our solar system are known as exoplanets.
Exoplanets excite our imagination because life forms like ourselves
live on planets.
And one of the biggest questions we have is, are we alone
in the universe?
Well, pondering the question is one thing.
Making direct observations and getting a real answer is another.
Despite discovering over 5,000 exoplanets, scientists know
very little about them.
To this date, all we know is a rough idea of the size and the mass
and how close it is to the star.
We don't know whether there are clouds or oceans, whether there's
an environment that would be friendly to life.
All we can give you are the most rudimentary specs of that planet.
If there is life on a planet out there, there is a way Webb
could detect it.
As the planet goes in front of the star, a tiny amount
of the starlight will pass through the atmosphere of the planet.
Webb is fitted with instruments that can analyse that light.
Atmospheres are like a thin rubber band stretched around a basketball.
They're very, very thin.
But we can actually get enough data to analyse what chemicals
are in that atmosphere.
We're entering an age where we can say, "This planet has water,
"this planet has methane, this planet has a temperature
"very similar to ours."
It could even be something as profound as we can detect
the presence of plant life, chlorophyll.
What if we detect a planet that has pollution?
What if we detect some sign of industrial activity, technology?
That's going to get a lot deeper.
We might be on the cusp of saying that there are other beings
up there that might be looking back at us.
With the sunshield and mirror sections of Webb complete,
engineers must put them through a battery of tests to make
sure the telescope can survive the extreme conditions of launch.
One of the toughest is the vibration test.
When a rocket launches, it's violently shaking, right,
cos this explosion is occurring in it.
So we actually put our vehicle on a table here and we shake
it like the rocket.
You know, it's a bit scary to think, you know, you're not trying
to break it, you're trying to prove it works.
But, you know, when you go - and I've watched us do the vibration
test, and all of a sudden you see your vehicle shaking,
you know, like... But you know it's designed for that,
so to watch the vibration test is, you know, you've got to kind
of hold your breath a little bit.
To enable the telescope to survive the violent launch, every part
of it that unfolds must be securely pinned down so it won't shake loose.
Once in space, these pin-down mechanisms must release
or the telescope won't unfold.
The sunshield alone has 107 mechanisms
and all 107 are required to make this thing work.
These critical release mechanisms are manufactured
here in Moorpark, California.
The whole mission depends on these tiny parts operating
without a glitch.
Krystal Puga is the engineer responsible for ensuring
that they will all work.
James Webb is a brand-new system.
It's a complex design. It's new.
It's not like anything that's ever been done before.
To make sure the giant sunshield won't shake loose and become
tangled during launch,
it is pierced with over 1,000 precisely placed holes.
When folded up into its stowed position,
the holes align on top of each other so the sunshield can be held
in place with pins and the 107 release mechanisms.
When we fold up the sunshield membrane, we actually fold
it accordion-style.
So at any one location, you can have 70 layers of membrane
all folded up.
There's holes in every single one of the layers.
They're all aligned so that you can stick a pin through the entire
stack of membranes.
We use a membrane release device...
..to hold the entire sunshield together.
So, we'll take this specially designed pin
and go through the entire stack of the sunshield membranes.
To protect the folded sunshield, spring-loaded covers
are unrolled over it...
..and attached to the release devices.
We want everything to be nice and stowed so that it doesn't get
damaged during the launch, and so that it can unfold
in the correct sequence when we deploy it in space.
To release the sunshield,
everything inside each release mechanism must work without a hitch.
Engineers will send an electric current that melts a fuse...
..that uncoils a spring...
..that splits a nut...
..that frees the pin...
..that unfastens the spring-rolled cover...
..that releases the sunshield.
All 107 release mechanisms must work for the covers to roll back.
If just one fails, the sunshield won't unfold
and the telescope won't work.
Over 30 years of effort will have all been for nothing.
What we're going to do to ensure that every single one of them
actuates properly is test, test, test.
Today, Krystal and the team are preparing to test one
of the mechanisms to check that it quickly releases the pin.
Countdown. Ready?
Three, two, one.
Fire!
The test measures how long it takes to melt the fuse.
So, it looks like the fuse of our burn time here is around 17.6
milliseconds, which is well below the maximum. Well below the required, yeah.
They have tested over 1,500 release mechanisms to be as sure
as they can that the ones they fit to the telescope will work
when it reaches space.
At the very end of the day, all you can do is hope
that everything works out well.
We have one shot to make this right.
It's got to work. It's got to work.
March 2021.
ECHOEY SHOUT: How do we look on the left side?
In the clean room in Los Angeles, technicians fold up the completed
telescope ready for launch.
When you stow Webb for the last time on Earth, you're setting,
really, the condition in which it's kind of determined, its probability
of success in orbit.
It's as simple as that.
Top of the list of things to do
on the world's most expensive camera -
remember to remove the lens cap.
The folding takes a long time, about a month.
It is critical if you think about folding up a parachute, right?
And then you have to go jump out of a plane.
So it has to be very meticulous.
After carefully folding the telescope,
the team encases it in its purpose-built container
to keep its pristine mirrors clean
on the journey to the launch site
in South America.
I'm in the space industry for 32 years,
12 of them on Webb, right?
So a third of my career.
So when the vehicle left,
it really felt like when my daughters left to go to school,
you're proud. You want them to go on.
It's kind of their step to be out on their own.
But at the same time,
you're already missing them, right?
The day that they leave, you're like,
"Oh, are they going to be OK," right, "on their own?"
From Los Angeles...
..a ship designed to transport rocket parts
carries the James Webb Space Telescope
on a 16-day journey
to its launch site in French Guiana.
October 2021.
The European Space Agency's Kourou Spaceport.
Over the next two months,
engineers prepare the telescope for launch.
They run final checks to ensure its systems have survived the journey...
..and fill it with the fuel that it will use to maintain its orbit.
Then they lower it into the nose of an Ariane 5 rocket.
Baltimore, Maryland.
Mission Control for the telescope
once it's in space.
Carl Starr waits to take command of the spacecraft
30 minutes after liftoff.
I'm the Mission Operations Manager - or the Mom.
So, everybody just calls me Mom.
That's me.
All stations, this is Mom on ops. All stations, this is Mom on ops.
Copy that, Mom.
Carl will be responsible for unfolding the telescope in space.
What's challenging is, it's just never been done before.
I always tell people my "aha!" moments.
We launch and we don't blow up.
That's a good one. I'm good there.
That'll be a big relief.
Two, we separate from the launch vehicle.
At that point, I know we've got a chance,
because I can't control the launch vehicle.
There's nothing against the launch vehicle -
it's a reliable, great launch vehicle, don't get me wrong -
but I have nothing to do with it. I can't control it. Nothing.
But the moment we separate from there,
now we've got a chance.
We've done over 70 rehearsals.
We know this vehicle.
It has taken £8 billion,
18 years
and over 100 million hours of people's time to build.
Now,
on Christmas Day 2021,
the James Webb Space Telescope is ready for launch.
All this work, time and money
sits on top of 669 tonnes
of explosive rocket fuel.
Ready to go.
I go through the same thing every launch.
As you get close to the pad
and certainly close to countdown,
the butterflies are just churning.
Une minute.
All right.
CHATTER
COUNTS DOWN IN FRENCH
And we have engine start.
And liftoff.
Decollage.
"Decollage." Liftoff from a tropical rainforest
to the edge of time itself,
James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.
27 minutes after liftoff...
..Ariane sends Webb on its month-long journey
to its orbiting position -
one and a half million kilometres away.
The team at the launch site have done their job.
Zero five three is complete -
separated from the launch vehicle.
Now it rests on the shoulders of Carl Starr
and the team at the telescope's control hub in Baltimore
to unfold Webb in space.
Deployments start on day three
and that continues for a good ten-plus days.
The team begins by deploying the pallets
that hold the sunshield.
It was very exciting, I must say.
There was a lot of tension.
The pallets came down very easily.
The operation went as planned.
It was really smooth.
Five days after launch,
it's time for the most challenging operation -
unfolding the giant sunshield.
They must start by rolling back the covers.
This is the critical moment
when all 107 release devices must work.
The membrane release devices.
We fired the whole string, and...
..that's when we realised
that we had a problem.
If all the release devices fire correctly,
the cover will roll back
and trigger switches
on the edge of the pallet.
The switches send a signal to Mission Control,
telling them that the cover has rolled back.
But what happened is we didn't see that.
We never saw the switches activate,
so we stopped.
We're not getting it.
So the next thing is to fire it again.
So we fired again and...
..it didn't work.
It looks like there may be a problem with the release devices.
Maybe not all of them fired,
maybe not all of them actually released.
It was very serious.
I'm not sure how to describe it but, again, it got very quiet
and people became very solemn.
The team fears they have lost the telescope.
So after a good day, day-and-a-half or so,
we realised that we'd already tried everything, electrically,
we could do, mechanically...
..and then it was a thermal engineer
that came to the rescue
and he said, "I'm seeing these temperatures
"and I'm telling you, the only way that you can get those temperatures
"is if there's nothing in the way.
"So, therefore, it must have unrolled.
"It just didn't hit the switch."
When they told us that...
..the looks on everybody's faces, the relief.
And from that moment on, we just never looked back.
They can now unfold the giant sunshield.
Inside the telescopic poles,
electric motors start pushing out the mid booms.
Now eight motors pulling on 90 cables,
running over 400 pulleys,
separate the sunshield's five layers.
Mom, I can confirm that all five layers of the sunshield
are fully tensioned.
Thank you.
Significant milestone accomplished.
Job well done, Sunshield Team. Job well done.
11 days after launch, the team deploys the secondary mirror...
..then moves the first wing of the primary mirror into position.
Two weeks after launch,
they start the final deployment -
unfolding the mirror's second wing.
The wing comes out pretty quick...
..but then a series of latching manoeuvres,
to establish a load on that tight fit, has to occur.
3,000.
2,000.
1,000.
And we have a fully deployed JWST.
CHEERING
The telescope is finally fully unfolded.
30 days after launch,
the James Webb telescope fires a thruster...
..and moves into its operational orbit.
Over the next few months, as it cools to its operating temperature,
optical engineers line up and focus the mirrors.
When the mirrors are first deployed,
they could be off by almost a millimetre from one another.
And we need to align them, ultimately,
as though they're a single mirror where, from one mirror to the next,
the surface is aligned to each other
to a fraction of a wavelength of light,
about 1/5,000th of a human hair.
The seven motors on the back of each mirror
will push and pull them into shape.
So we point it at a bright, isolated star, and the first thing we got
were 18 separate spots,
one for each of the primary mirror segments,
because they hadn't been aligned at all.
So that was the very first thing we saw.
And eventually we were able to identify which spot
was with which mirror segment.
And then we were able to align those into a nice, little array.
The 18 spots of light are all images of the same star.
Engineers make microscopic movements of Webb's mirrors...
..to bring the spots together...
..to form a single image.
With the telescope fully aligned,
astronomers start taking the first science images.
So it looks like we've got new data
and I'm opening the files now
to get a look.
Science visuals developer Joe DePasquale
will turn the raw black-and-white images
into colour pictures.
That is so amazingly sharp.
To do this, he borrows a technique used on Hubble.
Instead of using a colour camera,
Webb takes a sequence of black-and-white photos
through different coloured filters.
Each filter lets through different wavelengths of infrared light.
The three black-and-white photos
are coloured red, green and blue...
..and then combined to produce a colour image.
In June 2022,
scientists gather to see the Webb telescope's
first image of distant galaxies.
This is a full-colour draft image
that uses all of the available filters.
OK, let's observe the universe come into focus.
Oh. That's amazing.
Thank you.
Fantastic.
We look at this whole faint...
There's all this extra faint diffuse structure coming in.
There's a sort of a trail of stars coming at you
and there's this whole loop coming out here.
See that galaxy there?
I mean, that's a faint galaxy that you couldn't see with Hubble.
Straight out of the box,
Webb is making new discoveries.
Oh, my God. It's... It's mind-blowing.
The team of experts spotted types of galaxies we hadn't seen before,
and the sharpness we have with Webb was just unbelievable.
It blew my expectations.
Do we think this is the deepest image ever taken of the universe?
It's by far the deepest. By far the deepest at those wavelengths.
In this photo,
taken with an exposure of just 12 hours,
Webb is already seeing further back in time than Hubble.
In the near future, scientists will be doing even deeper fields.
But right now, at this moment, I think it's the deepest one
anybody has done so far.
In July 2022,
NASA releases the first images
from the James Webb Space Telescope.
This is a really big moment for astronomy
and it's a big moment for the world.
This image of the Southern Ring Nebula
captures the dying moments of a star
around 2,000 light years away.
This view of part of the Carina Nebula
shows the intense radiation
of newborn stars
carving away the nebula's wall of dust and gas.
It will help shape our understanding of how stars form and grow.
These pictures are just the start.
For years to come, scientists will study images from Webb
to learn about the origins and the far reaches of the universe.
I fully expect that the data will not only be scientifically
really important,
but will be compelling and awe-inspiring,
and help folks feel connected
to the universe that they're a part of.
We're going to see the universe in a whole new way
that we've never seen it before.
And when we do that,
who knows what we'll discover?
So it is a very exciting time.
I've been following the development of James Webb since I was in school.
I can never even remember a time in my life
where I didn't want to be exploring
and understanding our solar system and the universe -
so it really is a lifelong dream.
Every time you build a new instrument,
you discover new stuff.
And so I trust this is going to happen.
We have to be bold.
In order to get that bold science,
we had to build a bold telescope.
It couldn't have been a better mission
so I'm quite proud to be on it, no doubt about it.
It has taken over 30 years of imagination...
..invention...
..and sheer perseverance...
..to enable the world to finally see the first images...
..from the James Webb Space Telescope.