The James Webb Space Telescope

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2021

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope is only days away. Scheduled for lift off on 24 December, the largest and most complex space observatory ever built will be sent to an orbit beyond the moon. James Webb is so huge that it has had to be folded up to fit in the rocket. There will be a tense two weeks over Christmas and the New Year as the space giant unfurls and unfolds. Its design and construction has taken about 30 years under the leadership of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. With its huge 6.5 metre-wide primary mirror, the giant observatory promises to extend our view across the cosmos to the first stars to shine in the early universe. That’s a vista of Cosmic Dawn: the first small clusters of stars to form and ignite out of what had been a universe of just dark clouds of primordial gas. If the James Webb succeeds in capturing the birth of starlight, we will be looking at celestial objects more than 13.5 billion light years away. Closer to home, the telescope will also revolutionise our understanding of planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system. BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos reports from the European Space Agency’s launch site in French Guyana from where James Webb will be sent into space. He talks to astronomers who will be using the telescope and NASA engineers who’ve built the telescope and tested it in the years leading to launch. Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker BBC Inside Science is made in association with the Open University. Image: James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: Adriana Manrique Gutierrez, NASA animator

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, let me ask you, sir, have you heard George's podcast?
0:06.1	Me and Ben Brick are back with a blast, this time with stories from Africa's past.
0:11.0	Not too distant, unsolved mysteries, unsung heroes from untold histories, I'm trying
0:16.9	to make sense of the present day, join me on this journey by pressing play.
0:23.8	One or two more steps and I'll be there. It's not every day, you get to venture into the South American jungle, I'm bang on the equator, it's hot, it's sticky, and there's this constant chirping and chattering from the tropical birds and insects, but I'm here to witness important work because we're just days away now from the launch of
0:53.8	by far the largest and most sophisticated telescope ever to be sent into space, and I'm standing fully atop the launch pad where the rocket will leave earth to hurl this remarkable observatory into orbit.
1:06.8	On Inside Science this week, we're going to be talking about one of the grand scientific projects of the 21st century. Come with me, as I learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope.
1:19.8	It has two overarching goals, one is to look back to the beginning of galaxies, a moment we euphemistically call cosmic dawn.
1:30.8	We want to go back and see the first galaxies to form after the big bang, and the second is to look for Earth-like planets.
1:38.8	Trying to take images of them, wouldn't that be amazing?
1:42.8	It's such a large telescope and it has to be cooled to such cold temperatures.
1:47.8	It's almost a little bit hard to believe that we finally got there, and it is really, really exciting.
1:54.8	What's your reaction Mark, looking at it now, finished?
1:58.8	I have no idea what to say, it's astonishing. It just comes at you like a freight train, right? It's just there, this huge machine.
2:08.8	The James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
2:19.8	Like Hubble, it'll be sent to observe the universe way above the starlight distorting effect of the Earth's atmosphere.
2:26.8	But its mirror is much larger, and unlike Hubble, it's been built to image and analyze the cosmos in the region of the spectrum invisible to the human eye, in infrared light.
2:37.8	Both features are essential to see the faintest and most distant objects in the universe.
2:42.8	And because the speed of light is finite, James Webb is like a time machine.
2:47.8	We see those far away things as they were when the light rays first left the many billions of years ago.
2:54.8	With Hubble, we've caught mysterious glimpses of star clusters or proto-galaxies about half a billion years after the big bang.
3:04.8	If all goes to plan, James Webb will push our view back further still to the very first stars to be born.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.