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Wednesday Q+A with NASA's Eric Smith
The program scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Program discusses the telescope's stunning new images, and why they matter.
Dr. Eric Smith is the program scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Program, as well as the chief scientist of the Astrophysics Division. He's also held a similar role for Webb's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, and worked on the science team for the Space Shuttle-borne Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope. He spoke with Michelle Shen about the first images released from Webb this week, which President Biden called “a historic moment for science and technology," and the national and international collaboration required for such an undertaking, 26 years in the making. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you describe, in layman's terms, what exactly we're seeing in this image from the James Webb telescope?
The central object in this image looks sort of like white diffuse clouds—that is actually a cluster of galaxies. Then if you expand your eyes out from those white clouds in the center, you'll see there a lot of little reddish-looking arcs, and those arcs are distorted images of a galaxy that's farther away from us than those whitish blobs. So this tells us we're going to be able to see the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe when we really put Webb to the test.
How long did this project take, and what was involved in this massive effort?
This is a telescope that took the planet to build, in some sense. It's a collaboration led by NASA, but we involved partners of the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Our primary industry partner was Northrop Grumman. And the project itself has been going on for 26 years. It initially started with studies at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. And over that 26 years, we had to invent technologies to make the telescope happen. Some of the development took longer than we anticipated. We ran into challenges as we were putting it together because it was such a complex machine. We really pushed the boundary of industry capabilities, which in part is what NASA is supposed to do. Not only is this a win for our scientists and the data that comes to the public, but it's a win for industry because they get to invent new things and make better products themselves in the future.
NASA's Eric Smith NASA PHOTO
I also wanted to see if you could go into more depth about the implications of the scientific discovery and how it could potentially advance the U.S. and its strategic interests in space.
Nothing demonstrates U.S. leadership and the ability to do unbelievably hard things in space the way the James Webb Space Telescope does. We've never tried anything this difficult, this complex as far as deployment and automation, techniques for testing; all were really pushing the boundaries of what the U.S. is capable of. So if you want to make something that almost seems impossible in space, well, the U.S. is the place to do it.
What’s the strategic value of continuing this research, and what sort of things do you anticipate discovering in the future?
For lawmakers, the thing to remember is that a telescope like Webb or any big mission involves multiple districts. We had components coming to us from 29 states. Many states had multiple different vendors working on it. So it's a product of a nation. When you invest in essentially leading-edge technologies like Webb, you are going to stress the system, and that stress causes the system to grow; it causes new jobs to be made. One common error that I'll hear people make about anything in space is like, “Oh, why are they sending all this money to space?” No, you can't spend a single dime in space. All that money is spent on Earth, in lawmakers’ districts, and it's providing good jobs, and it's paying for people's cars, and it's advancing the nation through knowledge and brains. So I think this kind of work is one of the best things that the United States does. We built the mirrors. We mined the beryllium in Utah, shipped it to Ohio for machining, shipped down to Alabama for fixturing, shipped to California for further testing. Literally the mirrors travel all over the country. We built the spacecraft here; one of the instruments ... was built by Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, California. So there isn't a piece of Webb that doesn't have the U.S. in it somewhere.
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