The Webb Telescope's Faraway Revelations and Earth's Here-and-Now Challenges

NASA has two prime missions - looking up and looking down. Both are essential and full of wonder and promise.

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Stephan's Quintet (four galaxies are actually close to each other)

You likely have seen some of the stunning imagery that was unveiled today by NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute. You can download and explore five images and an enormous amount of related content at webbtelescope.org.

I ran a pop-up Sustain What webcast of the livestreamed event that you can watch here if you missed it:

The Webb Telescope, like Hubble before it, is mind blowing on several levels, both as a technical achievement and for the bravura nature of the decades-long policy, funding and scientific push required to sustain such grand projects. Read "Telescope Time Machine" by my Bulletin colleague David Kerley for that back story, centered on James Webb. Kerley also posted on the technical aspects of the satellite's orbit that make all of this possible. He did some helpful tweeting today as well , including this one noting that the colors are assigned back on Earth:

The first batch of images, as the NASA event today and an earlier teaser made clear, are breathtaking in at least three ways - for their scientific significance, for the sheer aesthetic wow factor and for the sense of wonder and humility they engender.

Your turn

What do these images engender in you? Please share your reactions in the comment thread or share this post on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere with your points.

During the event, project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan explained how a yearslong process winnowed 70 proposed targets to this handful "that would create the most beautiful images, highlight the four science instruments and highlight the main science themes for Webb." Yes, there's salesmanship at NASA, as at every agency.

But this really is a profound new frontier mission taking humans back in time and far away with unprecedented detail and data.

It's clear that the hundreds of scientists running and contributing to this mission and the related research efforts are not just here for the intellectual challenge.

One of my favorite moments in the rollout today came as Alex Lockwood, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, described the astounding detail in the near-infrared light and mid-infrared light images of the Southern Ring Nebula, 2000 light-years from Earth. Just listen to her exhalations and exclamations. Sure she's a communication specialist, too, but this sure feels like joy.

A vital complement - NASA's "Mission to Earth"

I posted pairs of images here and in the banner above that convey what I see as two complementary components of the space agency's mission - understanding and protecting the home planet and driving fundamental discovery of the world beyond Earth orbit. The image of pre-war Kiev at left below was taken and tweeted in 2017 by NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik from the International Space Station. At right is Webb's First Deep Field image, revealing a gallery of galaxies some 4.8 billion light-years from Earth.

My reporting on NASA has mainly focused over the decades on the instruments and initiatives pointed back at the home planet, not up. Both missions are necessary to building a sustainable future, to my mind.

Here's one particularly relevant 2006 New York Times story, from when the George W. Bush administration tried to tamp down the "Mission to Earth": "NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet."

From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can.”

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.” Read.

Luckily, stalwart NASA scientists, particularly the pioneering climate scientist Jim Hansen, along with some gutsy civil servants, helped reveal the issues to me and other reporters, and things changed, as I reported here: "NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness."

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