The Best Thing Ever

Christmas is a time for miracles. The miracle of Jesus of Nazareth’s Immaculate Conception and subsequent birth is of course the main one. But this year there was another; the successful launch on Christmas Day of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). I had been waiting quite literally my entire adult life for that day, and it finally arrived. It blasted off without a hitch on board a French-built Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency’s launch facility in French Guiana and, safely shot into orbit, James Webb is now cruising its way to its final resting place far beyond the moon.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a modern marvel. It is a huge infrared space telescope that took NASA 25 years to design and build, costing over 10 billion dollars –  twice as much as the Large Hadron Collider – and capable of seeing the oldest, faintest light in the entire universe. It will reveal the oldest galaxies, the very first stars. It is a time machine that will show us the dawn of existence. It is arguably the single best object that humans have ever produced. The best thing ever.

Despite the impressive though not flawless performance record of the Ariane 5, like many JWST fans, I had always dreaded launch day. The risks involved when riding rockets is uncomfortably high. With any rocket, but particularly solid-fuel rockets, there is always a disturbing chance that the whole package could be annihilated on the pad, or soon after launch, by some manner of catastrophic failure. That possibility was, for me, a stomach-wrenching worry. I can only imagine the levels of anxiety felt among JW’s actual engineers and technicians.

Those ESA and NASA folk sure are good at what they do though. Fantastically so. All credit to them. Thank heavens for high functioning, high IQ, people – I can barely comprehend the complexity of what they have achieved. It’s quasi-magical to me. I don’t know how a television works, not really, not properly; I couldn’t design and build a television from scratch. I have no idea how the internet pipes flash their fibre optic light packets, and how that somehow means I can stream videos. I barely understand the geometry involved in the trajectory of James Webb’s flight path, which, I’m told, isn’t especially difficult. I just thank God for those among us whose brains are able to thrive on advanced mathematics and physics. I, much to my chagrin, cannot count myself among their number.

We live at a time when many systems and functions of society appear to be in decline, a time when subversion and artificial social divisions are being sown in order to drag culture backwards and down some very dark avenues. Far from a golden age. Yet in other ways, and in all sorts of fields, we live in a time of unprecedented discovery and advancement. The leaps forward in medical science and nanotechnologies, 3D printing and genome sequencing; it’s all scarcely believable, in a wonderful way. Yet, in the field of cosmology, we are living at the beginning of what must surely be its golden age. In the next generation or two we – humanity – are likely to open windows on the universe which would have been unthinkable even in the 20th century. For the first time, a veritable suite of telescopes will work in unison to reveal the secrets of the universe. X-ray, radio, optical, and infrared, both in space and on the ground, will continue to get better and better, working with each other to learn more and more. Hubble, mainly operating in the optical field, and already 30 years old, will eventually be replaced with a more sensitive instrument. With the advent of ‘adaptive optics’, gigantic Earthbound optical telescopes are set to surpass Hubble’s capability by the end of this decade. A collaboration of many radio telescopes across the planet has effectively constructed a receiver the size of the Earth. The line between science and magic, at this point, is gloriously blurred for me. I look on as a wide-eyed child, open-mouthed, spellbound.

The engineering involved is spectacular. The James Webb Space Telescope – named after an illustrious and early head of NASA – is primarily designed to peer into the infrared spectrum of light, and so is a very different beast to Hubble. It requires extremely cold conditions in order for its absurdly sensitive instruments to detect the faintest, most stretched out, primaeval light. The first light. Therefore, it has to sit in a strange orbit, known as the Lagrange 2 point – L2 for short – far out beyond the moon, and with a ‘sunshield’ to keep the telescope itself  just a few degrees above absolute zero. Unlike Hubble again, which rests in low Earth orbit like a satellite or the space station, there is no possibility for a rescue or maintenance mission for James Webb. Everything must work perfectly, first time.

After JWST has unfurled itself in a perilous and fraught set of procedures which are far from certain or guaranteed, it will then need further months to cool down to its optimal operational temperatures before finely focussing its huge gold-plated beryllium mirrors. We should not expect cutting edge science to be forthcoming until the summer. At that point though, if all has gone to plan, we can expect some of the most breathtaking images that have ever existed. In the infrared spectrum, we can see through dust and gas and nebulae of all descriptions. We will see things we haven’t expected: things we couldn’t have dreamt of. We will gaze back in time, impossibly far back, mind-meltingly far back, and we will stand on the shoulders of giants as we do so; from Galileo to Brian Cox. We will stand in awe of our strange and beautiful cosmos. It’ll be the best thing ever.