America was a divided country, but that didn’t stop it from building parts of the James Webb Space Telescope in a red state and testing them in a blue one.
The European Union and Russia faced Ukraine and other issues this year, but scientists on both sides will benefit greatly from the discoveries that could soon come within reach.
And as the pandemic tightened supply chains around the world, no lockdown could derail the telescope’s trajectory to the stars: parts were assembled in multiple countries, then tested in the United States, and the finished product landed on a launch pad in France. Guyana before it was flung into space on Christmas Day.
In a sense, the James Webb space telescope told a story rarely heard today: the story of nations coming together for a common ambition. At a time when countries are divided over climate change, migration and a disease that has claimed millions, the spacecraft – launched to search for habitable planets and find the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies – was a powerful reminder that international cooperation is on the way. large-scale projects was still possible.
“I like to think that science is a way to mitigate some of the extreme situations we have on this planet,” said Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in England who oversaw mission control of the telescope. Centre. “And I’ve always seen space as an area where we work together, in all the difficult times.”
However, with collaboration has come competition. China, which did not participate in the project, plans to launch its own space telescope that is expected to be something of a competitor. China is also collaborating with Russia on its own missions as the space alliance between Russia and the US has come under pressure due to political tensions between the countries.
Still, the telescope’s design and launch, which took more than 30 years, required not only the collaboration of scientists around the world, but also the sharing of the $10 billion cost, which was largely covered by the US. Unlike the Perseverance rover to Mars, a mostly American affair launched last year and overseen by NASA, the James Webb Space Telescope was a joint venture of NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency. – the largest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built.
Even as the upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic changed the political landscape, none of it affected the telescope project. The work transcended the rise of Donald J. Trump in the United States, Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, and the growing popularity of nationalist movements in Europe, including many whose supporters have questioned the science of vaccines.
When the pandemic brought travel bans around the world, German scientists had to figure out how to remotely test parts of the telescope located in California’s Redondo Beach.
“I used to come to Los Angeles a lot and then suddenly you couldn’t do that anymore,” said Oliver Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, which is working on the successor to the Webb telescope, which is already underway in California. He said the teams spent weeks coming up with solutions.
Mr. Krause’s own contributions were the most important pieces of the engineering puzzle – the wheels that allow the telescope’s mid-infrared camera and spectrograph to switch between different modes. His team in Heidelberg, Germany, was chosen to build them because of his long expertise in the moving parts of telescopes.
“It’s critical because if the wheel gets stuck in an intermediate position, suddenly no light comes in,” he said, praising the German technique. Other parts of the telescope, such as the sunshade, were built at sites such as Huntsville, Ala.
Just as the telescope’s components navigated boundaries and political divides, so did experts like Sarah Kendrew, an instrument and calibration scientist at the European Space Agency who is also an astronomer.
Ms. Kendrew helped create one of the main components of the telescope, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI. The device is able to detect light from the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum – invisible to the eye – and can reveal faint galaxies, stars in formation and planets orbiting other stars known as exoplanets.
Ms. Kendrew’s work on MIRI began during a postdoctoral fellowship in the Netherlands in 2008. She then moved to Germany, where the instrument was tested, and to the United Kingdom, where she continued to work on MIRI and other astronomical instruments. Finally, in 2016, she moved to Baltimore, which became the telescope’s mission control center.
“Science is one of those areas where you have to learn to work across borders and across political divides,” she said shortly after returning home from Kourou, French Guiana, a French region of South America, where she watched the telescope launch. .
There seemed to be something hopeful about the launch itself, at the end of an extremely difficult year in a world desperate for good news. Watched in many countries, it dates back to the opening of the International Space Station two decades ago, or the early Apollo missions to the moon, when people tuned in to watch the space race around the world take place.
“People all over the world watched the James Webb launch,” said Michaël Gillon, a Belgian astrophysicist involved in the project. “Even if they’re in China or North Korea, it’s something that’s interesting to them. And the possibility of discovery interests people, regardless of their religion or political system.”
As scientists look to the telescope to answer countless questions about the universe, the one that has sparked the most excitement is something mankind has long wondered: Will there be others looking back at us from the stars?
Searching for signs of life on other planets, Mr. Gillon assembles the team that may one day return with an answer.
Using previous telescopes, Mr. Gillon discovered seven Earth-sized planets in the Trappist-1 galaxy, in the constellation Aquarius. He named each after one of his favorite beers.
“We wanted to give a Belgian touch to the project,” he joked.
To fully study Trappist-1, he organized a consortium of more than 100 scientists, including those from Morocco, Japan and the Netherlands, and pooled their resources to jointly investigate the galaxy.
“We may even be able to detect some traces of biological activity, which is really the holy grail of the field,” said Mr. Gillon.
The astronomer thought for a moment about the possible effect of finding life in the cosmos at a time when climate change and disease seem to threaten our collective future.
“It wouldn’t solve all our problems,” he acknowledged. “I still think this is something that would bring magic and the sense of being human.”