ABSTRACT

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021 after 25 years of planning, design, development, integration, and testing. Following a six-month deployment and commissioning period, the first science results from Webb have engaged the public and surprised the scientists. Early results range from the most distant galaxies to black holes to interacting galaxies to star-forming regions to exoplanet atmospheres to our own Solar System.

Webb is the scientific successor to the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. It is a large (6.6m), cold (55K), deployed telescope in orbit around the second Earth-Sun Lagrange point. It is a partnership of NASA with the European and Canadian Space Agencies; and was built by hundreds of companies and thousands of people. Webb has four instruments that do both imaging and spectroscopy from visible to infrared wavelengths, 0.6 to 28 microns. Webb's science goals address our origins and the history of the universe: the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Band; the morphological and dynamical buildup of galaxies; the formation of stars and planetary systems; and exoplanets, our Solar System, and the conditions for life.

Jonathan Gardner will review Webb's construction, launch, and deployments, and discuss the commissioning of the telescope and its instruments. He will describe what scientists have learned in the first few months of science results from the telescope and look ahead to additional results expected in the coming years.

About the Speaker:

Jonathan P. Gardner is the Deputy Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, a position he has held since 2002 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, looks backwards in time to find the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, to trace their evolution into galaxies like our own Milky Way, and to connect the formation of stars and planets with the history of our own Solar System.

Gardner received an AB degree from Harvard and MS and PhD from the University of Hawaii. As a NATO Fellow, he did postdoctoral research at the University of Durham in the UK. He came to NASA-Goddard in 1996 to work with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, shortly before its launch and installation on Hubble in early 1997. On the Webb project, he works with the other scientists to ensure the scientific success of the mission, now coming to fruition with Webb's early results. In addition to his role on Webb, Gardner also served as the Chief of Goddard's Observational Cosmology Laboratory from 2006 until the launch of Webb on Christmas Day, 2021.