Inside the Universe Machine: IEEE Spectrum Explores the Webb Telescope's Groundbreaking Engineering

Abstract

On 11 July, President Joe Biden unveiled the first publicly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The big announcement came after a nail-biting but thankfully uneventful 198-day journey after the telescope's December launch as it traveled to its destination in deep space. In the interim, Webb had unboxed, unfolded, and unfurled itself as the observatory made its way to a position more distant than the moon and far enough away from Earth to evade stray infrared photons coming from our planet. • The image itself, of a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, was a jaw-dropping collection of astrophysical and cosmological desiderata. “You start looking at this image and realize there's no blank sky- there's something crazy happening everywhere,” the astronomer B. Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University, in Columbus, told Space.com. As can be seen in a dozen or more journal articles already written about the image, Webb essentially unveiled whole new regions of the universe never observed before. • The farthest edges of cosmic distance that the Hubble Space Telescope probed showed light emitted 420 million years after the big bang. Webb blew that door open with its kickoff image alone─by one count resolving at least 88 galaxies beyond Hubble's purview. Moreover, it can theoretically see all the way back into a universe just tens of millions of years old. And this is to say nothing of Webb's equally revolutionary capabilities at observing exoplanets, galactic structure, star formation, objects within our own solar system, and on and on. • How can Webb do all this? What's the groundbreaking engineering that enabled the groundbreaking science this telescope now seems well poised to perform? Two regular IEEE Spectrum contributors and one of the magazine's associate editors surveyed the teams at NASA, the European Space Agency, Northrop Grumman, and elsewhere who designed, built, and launched this incredible “universe machine.” The story they revealed highlights just how herculean the effort was to construct this portal into cosmic time and astronomical discovery─one that's literally and figuratively beyond the moon.