The James Webb Telescope Is Reshaping Astronomy. GUESTS: Tony Hull, Diana Dragomir, Bob Woodruff. To look back in time at the cosmos’s infancy and explore the universe’s very first stars, requires a mirror as big as a house. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) promises to revolutionize our understanding of distant planets, the cosmos and deep time and potentially uncover evidence of extraterrestrial life. Already this powerful NASA telescope has found exciting new discoveries about galaxies, stars, exoplanets.
We will be sharing the latest images from the JWST, which are breathtaking and significant. As we marvel at the stunning new images from Deep Space, the data for the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and astrobiology will grow exponentially. What will this reveal? What new questions and insight will emerge from the long-range, detailed views of the Cosmos? How might this affect our concept of home, and a new identity as citizens of the cosmos? The JWST project is an ambitious scientific endeavor to answer these questions.
Webb builds on the legacy of previous space-based telescopes to push the boundaries of human knowledge even further, to the formation of the first galaxies and the horizons of other worlds. We are excited to have our panel of Astronomers to help us welcome the images and data from the powerful JWST telescope! We are all “stakeholders” in the ongoing quest for new information, for ‘widening our bandwidth” and the implications it has for an emerging new story of not just our Universe, but ourselves, and our place in it.
Tony Hull, Adjust Professor of Astronomy at the University of New Mexico, Dept of Physics & Astronomy. Tony led the team that spent five years polishing the JWST mirror segments, and has been giving talks around the world on what the new images, and promise, of this remarkable technology.
Diana Dragomir, Professor of Astrobiology at the University of New Mexico, Dept of Physics & Astronomy. Diana will conduct studies of planets outside our solar system, with data from the JWST. What kind of data? What will it mean, adding to the long study and search for exo-planets? What fundamental questions about life and the formation of the universe, and what entirely new questions are anticipated?
Bob “Woody” Woodruff, is the world’s most recognized designer of optical instruments in space. Woody was the optical designer finding the correction saving Hubble from its early severe issues and later personally initiated the optical form of the Webb Space Telescope, unlike any telescope the world has seen. Woody has been a key player in the most advanced high-performing space telescopes and instruments NASA has implemented.