Retired NASA scientist talks telescopes at Rotary

Where did we come from? Is there life on other planets? Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Dec. 25, 2021, Frank Sulzman says scientists are closer to answering those questions. 

“The Webb is like a time machine,” Sulzman said at the Rotary Club’s monthly meeting on Aug. 16. “You’ll be able to take different slices of time in the age of the universe and see how things progressed.”

About 25 members and guests gathered in person and on Zoom to hear Sulzman discuss the new space-based telescope and the images released by NASA on July 12. Sulzman managed NASA’s Biomedical Research Program and was a space radiation program executive before retiring in 2013. 

During the Q&A, Nick Driver wanted to know how the images were in color. He asked, “If the light collected is in infrared, how is it that we see blue and red and yellow and all the different colors in the web images?”

Sulzman’s PowerPoint presentation included a slide with Vincent Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" next to the telescope’s image of Carina Nebula. He said that while beautiful and informative, graphic designers shift the color spectrum into what’s visible to the eye for the public’s benefit.

“The Webb Space Telescope looks at the red and infrared part of the spectrum our eyes cannot see,” he said. 

The Webb can see through “space dust” that the Hubble Space Telescope cannot. It also has a larger sun shield and orbits about a million miles from Earth where astronauts can’t reach it. The Hubble orbits only a few hundred miles from Earth. Astronauts have repaired and upgraded Hubble since its launch in 1990.

“There were more than 340 single point failures possible in this deployment of the Webb,” Sulzman said. “If any one of them didn’t work, the whole mission would have failed."

The Webb took more than 20 years to develop and cost about $10 million to build and operate.