Collaborative science and human ingenuity

(Mains GS 3 : Science and Technology- Developments and their Applications and Effects in Everyday Life.)

Context:

• Recent reports from NASA inform that the deployment and aligning of the mammoth James Webb telescope is proceeding well and may even ‘exceed expectations’. 
• The launch of the satellite, on 25 December 2021, was a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency and involved many universities, organisations, and companies across 14 countries.

Significant achievement: 

• The making of the $9.7 billion James Webb telescope is  one of the most significant technological achievements of the last few years, involving construction, transportation, launching, alignment, and deployment in deep space.
• The James Webb telescope was imagined by its initiators as the coming together of many cutting-edge technologies. 
• It was planned to enable humanity to peer deeper into space and to look further back in time as the telescope will give us new knowledge about the origins of the universe.
• Because it is essentially an Infra-red spectrum telescope, as compared to the Hubble which worked largely in the UV and visible light range, it will allow us to stare into the beginnings of the ‘cosmic dawn’, a period 250 million years after the big bang when light began to break through the cloud of mist and the first stars and galaxies began to form. 
• The JWST will take us back about 150 million years further than Hubble, closer to when it all began.

Place in the universe:

• The project seeks to understand how galaxies form and evolve and will look for evidence of dark matter, study exoplanets, capture images of planets in our solar system, and other such cosmic curiosities. 
• This knowledge will impact not just the physical sciences but also the humanities and social sciences as we attempt to understand our own place in the universe.
• In this ambition, the JWST belongs to the classical tradition of scientific inquiry: the pursuit of fundamental curiosity untouched by special interests.

Collective effort:

• Although the ambition of the project was to understand the origin of the universe, and our place in it, the execution of the project was a stellar product of collective endeavour.
• Although there were many remarkable individuals who led the various groups in the project, the emphasis throughout was on its accomplishment by teams who worked together to fabricate the instruments, make the telescope parts, design the cooling systems, etc. 
• This new collective, comprising of free scientists and engineers, collaborated with the single purpose of producing, launching, and placing, at the chosen Lagrange point (a point where the Earth’s and Sun’s gravitational forces are balanced), a telescope that was lighter than Hubble but had a mirror six-time larger.

Human ingenuity:

• The science and technology that was deployed should be toasted as a tribute to human ingenuity. 
• Eighteen hexagonal beryllium mirrors first had to be folded to fit the available space in the Arianne rocket and then unfolded, in deep space, to make a single mirror with nanometric precision. 
• The JWST teams built and installed a Near Infra-Red spectrograph, a Near Infra-Red camera, a slitless spectrograph, and, after technical difficulties, a Mid Infra-red instrument because, unlike the other instruments that need to be cooled to 40K, it needs to be cooled to 7K. 

Conclusion:

• The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a project that marked twenty-plus years of continuous collaboration between many teams. 
• These collaborative achievements have produced a sophisticated scientific infrastructure for exploring space and for opening the door to new scientific knowledge and creating a new ‘knowledge commons’.