Webb Space Telescope makes history after tense launch

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Hi, Benjamin from the Nature Podcast here. Something a little bit different this week – we are going to take a bit of a dive into some of the stories that have appeared in the Nature Briefing over the past few days and weeks, and joining me to do so in this episode of the podcast are Noah Baker. Noah, how are you doing?

Noah Baker

I’m very well, thank you. Happy new year to you all.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Happy new year indeed. And the one and only, Flora Graham, who is of course editor of the Nature Briefing. Flora, how are you doing?

Flora Graham

I am great. Happy new year. Great to be here.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Fantastic. Well, listen, we’re going to talk about a few stories, as I say, that have been covered in the Nature Briefing. Noah, would you like to go first this week? What have you got to talk about?

Noah Baker

Sure, so we’ve talked about this a few times before on the podcast, but it’s continuing to develop and it’s exciting, and that is the James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched on Christmas Day.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Yes, I must confess, I was refreshing the news feeds on Christmas Day while trying to sort of simultaneously cook three different dishes to see whether it successfully launched because, of course, I think everyone was biting their fingernails a little bit.

Noah Baker

Yeah, this is a project that has been plagued by endless delays, and I couldn’t work out whether or not it was just a coincidence or some kind of big PR move that it ended up launching on Christmas Day itself. It was very exciting. Anyway, it has now launched. This is the biggest and most sophisticated space telescope ever. It’s Hubble’s successor. And after the launch, which was exciting in and of itself, there’s been many, many days of kind of very tense unfurling and releasing that’s happened because all of its various instruments have to be clicked into place in space. The whole telescope was folded up very, very tightly to fit into a little capsule on top of the Ariane 5 rocket that it launched on, and then gradually it’s all been unfurled. It’s amazing. It’s like a giant game of, I don’t know, Meccano, to watch it happen. And it has now, as of 8 January, finally clicked its last instrument into place. It doesn’t mean it’s finished yet but it is now unfurled and open.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

I mean, this was no mean feat, Noah, because this is happening a very, very long way away from Earth.

Noah Baker

Absolutely, so it’s currently not actually at the place that it’s going to finally settle, the orbit’s going to settle, which is called L2. It’s currently around a million kilometres away from Earth, so the very, very first thing that needed to happen is it needed additional little extra burns to get it into the right position, and it needed to unfurl its solar panels, which happened. And then from then on it was able to start releasing things in kind of a less time-sensitive way. One of the things that sets apart the James Webb Space Telescope from Hubble and other telescopes is that it can look at infrared light, which means it can look further into the Universe. But in order to do that, it needs to shield itself from the heat from the Sun, and so it’s got this really elaborate, giant, five layers of heatshield – sunshield, they call it – and this like tennis-court sized, kite-shaped sort of floppy… there is a really wonderful quote in the story that our colleague Alex Witze wrote, which was, ‘We were nervous because we had never deployed something that big and floppy before.’ Which they deployed in space and it is now all out. And then after that, they had to deploy 18 different hexagonal-shaped mirrors to make this giant mirror, and then they had to swing out an arm with another secondary mirror on it. And all this had to happen in sequence. It had to happen without fault. And although it’s been tested over and over again on land, it’s all different in zero gravity, and things could happen and you never know if they’re going to go wrong. But it didn’t, and everything happened perfectly. It’s all in place, which means that now it needs to start doing the fine-tuning bits, so it’s adjusting all of its mirrors to get them focused properly. It’s getting everything looking in the right direction so that in about five more months it’s going to be all in place at its position at L2 – this orbit that it needs to be at – and then it can start returning scientific results and calibrating its four scientific instruments and things. All very, very exciting.

Flora Graham

And I think an important point is that this telescope really needs to cool down. That’s one of the reasons why it’s going to take so many months, and one of the reasons why it’s having to sit so far out into space is because it has to be incredibly, incredibly cold in order for its cameras to detect this very, very, very faint infrared signal from very distant stars. So, the cooling down process is a big one, and that’s why it has a huge sunshield.

Noah Baker

Absolutely, there was also a radiator that had to be swung out to funnel heat away from the telescope’s instruments as well, which is another part of the sort of deployment process. It’s amazing actually that the instruments need to be kept at 40 degrees above absolute zero, so incredibly cold, but the prediction is that on the other side of the sunshield it’s going to be about 100 degrees. This is how clever this sunshield is to protect the instruments. And so far, so good.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Yeah, absolutely. But I must say, I’m so excited to see the first images that come back from this telescope. Like many of our listeners I’m sure, my wallpaper on my laptop back in the day was the Hubble space images and genuinely I just can’t wait.

Noah Baker

The other day I was chatting about neutrinos actually with one of our colleagues, Davide Castelvecchi, and it reminded me of a series that we made of videos called ‘Hubble moments’, where we asked astronomers for particular moments that came from Hubble, images that really helped define their career, that stood out to them, that gave them sort of a sense of wonder. And it was amazing looking back at all the things that Hubble has done, all these images that we, I guess, culturally just know and understand and are so part of us that came from this instrument. And it’s really exciting to think about this next sort of swathe of images that are going to become part of this sort of culture of the future. It is really, really, a properly exciting bit of science. I love it.

Flora Graham

I’m almost not wanting to get too excited still, though. There’s just this last little bit. This has been such a beacon of hope and such a nice thing to enjoy in the midst of everything that’s going on, but I still feel like I’m kind of perched on the edge of my seat until those first images come in.

Noah Baker

I mean, it’s very true. And we should remember that Hubble had plenty of problems as well when it was launching. It had to have several corrective missions. In fact, one of the ‘Hubble moments’ we filmed was with Mike Massimino, one of the astronauts that had to go up and fix Hubble, and he talked about when he was doing his space walks up there, trying to get the right mirrors to work in the proper way.

Flora Graham

That’s amazing because, yeah, of course it can’t be done with Webb. It’s so far away. It’s much, much, much further out than the Moon, for example, so it can’t be ever visited by astronauts, we don’t think. In fact, we don’t even have a view of it. Some people are jokingly saying we need to launch another space telescope just so that we can look at the James Webb Space Telescope because of course all we’re seeing our simulations of what it looks like. It’s far too far for us to see it and there’s no cameras on it that are pointing at itself.

Noah Baker

There’s a wonderful point made in the story that our colleague Alex Witze wrote where she talks about the moment that the secondary mirror was finished being deployed, and so the mirror was looking at the big mirror, and that’s the moment we could finally define this as a telescope, officially. Because up until then, it’s just a load of bits in space. But once you’ve got mirrors looking at each other in the right way and pointing in a direction, even though they’re not calibrated, even though it won’t technically give you a good image yet, photons move in the right way so now it’s technically a telescope. So, at least we’ve got that far, but we need the images, so crossing our fingers.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, yes, fingers and toes crossed, Noah, of course, and I know we’ll have the latest updates on that as and when they happen. But I think we talked about this being a good news story, a happy story, something that people are really, really into, and that’s what I’m going to bring to today’s Briefing chat, and this was reported in The Guardian, and it’s the story of something that’s been discovered, a fossil that’s been discovered that’s been described as one of the greatest finds in the history of British palaeontology, which is quite a big claim, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Noah Baker

It’s a huge claim. I mean, the first obvious question is what is it because I want to know why it’s surpassed the previous great discoveries in British palaeontology.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, that’s a great question, Noah, and in this case, it’s an ichthyosaur. Okay, so this was an aquatic reptile, sort of contemporaneous with the dinosaurs but it wasn’t a dinosaur. Apparently, this one lived maybe about 180 million years ago, and it was discovered by chance in a place called Rutland, which is an area in kind of the centre of England, so nowhere near the coast.

Noah Baker

Yeah, because famously ichthyosaurs were first discovered on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset by a woman called Mary Anning. There’s whole films about that. People should watch them. They’re great. There’s also a wonderful haul at the Natural History Museum – my favourite bit of my favourite museum in the whole world. But this one was found in the middle of the UK. Tell us why is that exciting and what is particularly interesting about this ichthyosaur?

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, let me tell you about how it was found, I think, and that will maybe give us a sense of what it was. So, one of the people who were working at this nature reserve was working –they’d been draining some lagoons – and he was walking along and he saw something that looked kind of organic, kind of skeletal, and realised pretty straight away that it was probably a bit of bone, a bit of a fossil, right? So, this is amazing. I heard him on the radio talking about this. He said he wasn’t sure what to do so he phoned up the local council, so kind of the local government authority, and said, ‘I think I’ve found a dinosaur,’ to which they kind of scratched their heads and went, ‘Okay, right. Not sure what to do about that.’ But they sent some palaeontologists along who quickly realised it wasn’t a dinosaur. As I say, it was this ichthyosaur, and a little bit more uncovering and a little bit more work on it suggested that it is huge, this thing. It’s about 10 metres long, so 30 feet long from nose to tail, and it’s apparently pretty much complete all the way along, which is amazing. So, it’s in really, really good shape. And, as you say, Noah, it’s kind of unusual to find these things inland, but I think what researchers are hoping is that this is going to give more of a sense of the evolution of these kind of giant, aquatic reptiles and their locations. I think, from what I understand, this area of the UK would have been a shallow sea all this time ago, so it’s a ways away from where it was previously assumed they would be.

Flora Graham

To give you some context, this ichthyosaur is not even the first one found in this particular reservoir – they did apparently find a few when they were very first setting up this nature reserve – but it’s the first of this species to be found in the United Kingdom, and it’s part of this lineage of discoveries of ichthyosaurs that starts when Mary Anning found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton ever discovered, and she was only 12 years old when this happened. So, this is part of kind of a legacy for this particular species, which is really enjoyable.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Yeah, in your Briefing message, Flora, you said the Ichthyosaurs hold a special place in kind of the heart of Great Britain and, speaking as a Canadian then, is that something you get a sense of?

Flora Graham

Oh, definitely. Yeah, I mean, I think that different regions have the kind of favourites that tend to be found around and become almost like the mascots, and I think especially the story of Mary Anning, who came from a very impoverished background. She wasn’t educated because she was a girl. Her dad died when she was young and he trained her up to find fossils in order to make more money for their family in this incredibly fossil-rich part of the country called Lyme Regis. It’s such an amazing story and how she rose to be so influential in palaeontology despite, as you can imagine during the regency period, huge barriers.

Noah Baker

I definitely think the Mary Anning connection does place ichthyosaurs quite in a special place in my heart, and it’s also, I don’t know, whenever I imagine an ichthyosaur, I imagine these kind of dolphin-sized at most sort of fishes, these kind of weird, they’re not fishes, they’re reptiles, but they have fish-like tails, a dolphin-like face, weird, giant eyes, chubby little round bodies. They’re so cute. So thinking of one that was that big is also quite exciting.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

But by no means the biggest one discovered, Noah. Apparently they range from like 1 metre to like 25 metres long, and they first appeared about 250 million years ago, I understand, and went extinct about 90 million years ago, and some were considered to be apex predators and they ate all sorts of things. One of the things I read about this finding is that maybe there’s still some more going on this area. Some teeth that weren’t from this ichthyosaur were found kind of nearby apparently, I read somewhere, so maybe it shows that these ichthyosaurs could have been doing some sort of scavenging as well, rather than just sort of attacking whatever it was that was their normal prey. So, still lots to be discovered here, and a lovely find and I’m sure there’ll be more to it as it gets uncovered because it’s still mostly in rock, so I think they’re currently very carefully excavating it, and obviously taking pictures from every single angle to try and recreate what it actually looked like.

Noah Baker

I feel like ‘big dinosaur, scavenger or predator?’ is like a thing I’ve heard so many times with the T. rex and so on, and I love that this particular ichthyosaur is now part of that discussion.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, that’s my story for this week but, Flora, of course, you’ve written all of the stories that have appeared in the Briefing over the past few weeks. What’s really struck a chord with the readership, do you think?

Flora Graham

I think two of the biggest stories coming into the new year have got to be these two big legal stories that are going to affect scientists. One is the conviction of a renowned researcher named Charles Lieber in the US of hiding his ties to China. So, he’s been found guilty of hiding ties to this big programme called the Thousand Talents programme. This is a major move in the story of the United States’ crackdown on researchers with connections to China. This is the first one that has gone to trial and found the researcher guilty, so this is going to have repercussions for scientists around the US, some of whom who have expressed concerns that this crackdown is maybe sometimes catching people up in a net who maybe didn’t pay enough attention to their forms or something like that. So, there’s a real question about what impact this might have on people’s abilities to feel confident doing international collaborations, or even whether the US government will go forward with more of these types of prosecutions or whether it will lead to more out-of-court settlements and things like that. The other big court case that we saw over the holidays was the conviction of Elizabeth Holmes for fraud relating to her Theranos blood-testing company. This was a very high-profile company that claimed it could test for all kinds of health-related things just from a little pinprick of blood, so could save people a lot of time and pain. Now, it turned out that these claims were greatly exaggerated and the conviction has come down to claims of fraud for investors. Now, charges about fraud related to patients were not held up in this case. And this story has really become a cautionary tale for scientists involved in entrepreneurial work, specifically and particularly in the blood-diagnostics field. What experts are saying is that it’s important to share data and get into some kind of peer-review process so that these kinds of things don’t come to light way too late.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Flora, you say a cautionary tale there, I guess for both of these stories. What have researchers been saying?

Flora Graham

I think scientists are really interested to see what the conviction of Charles Lieber is going to mean for other scientists working in the country. Some are saying, and I’m reading this in Science, which is the article I linked to from the Briefing, that, yes, this is a deterrent, but it’s also been really terrifying for scientists pursuing collaborations. The question is, is this of value to society? Is this level of crackdown actually helping scientific innovation that is positive for the United States?

Noah Baker

Absolutely, and I think with so many eyes on China, which there have been for a long time, and the pandemic has only increased those eyes, that kind of interrogation of Chinese science, of Chinese collaborations, this is certainly going to be something that a lot of scientists are going to be watching closely. Collaboration with China is something that can be tricky to do. We’ve actually published a video about how kind of a UK-based lab has a collaboration with a Chinese lab, and there lots of kind of cultural things to overcome as well as political things to overcome, and now there’s also legal frameworks that you need to work within. But this case, I think, has just caused a lot of unsettlement within the sort of research community about how to have these kinds of collaborations in an appropriate way.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, thank you, Flora. And listeners, if you’d like to learn more about these stories, look out for links to them in the show notes. But let’s do one more fun one to round things off today, and one of my favourite jokes as a kid was: ‘Two fish in a tank. One says to the other, ‘How do you drive this thing?’’, which is weirdly kind of related to this story.

Flora Graham

I mean, this is a story that’s going to stay in my mind forever. I think I wrote about it on 4 January. As far as I’m concerned, it’s already one of the greatest stories of 2022.

Noah Baker

I’m going to jump in very quickly before we talk about this research and say that I have not read this story and I have no idea where we’re going at all.

Flora Graham

Laughs. Well, you have to read it because it’s got video, and the video is just delightful. Now, I’m always a little bit hesitant when it comes to research involving animals. The respect for their lives as creatures is extremely important to me. But this goldfish is having a fantastic time. The answer to your question, Ben – how do you drive this thing – well you install some LiDAR cameras, detect what quadrant of the tank the goldfish is in, and you train the goldfish to expect rewards in certain areas. And then you put the fish in the tank, and when it moves into certain quadrants – the tank is on wheels at this point – it drives in that direction, and the fish, this is a Carassius auratus goldfish, can drive this around on land. They’ve got video of it driving around outdoors to find a treat. So, this really is an amazing reflection of how animals’ abilities to navigate can adapt to different situations. Now, I’m sure this goldish had not had an opportunity to do much navigating on land and in rooms and outdoors before, but with a bit of training and a few rewards and a very delightfully designed experimental setup, the fish was able to go get what it wanted on land.

Noah Baker

So, correct me if I’m wrong. This is not just a bunch of scientists saying, ‘I wonder if we can make a goldfish drive?’ It’s actually a really interesting way of understanding the kind of adaptability of behaviour to get something that’s literally a fish – I mean, it’s in water but in this context it’s out of water – and it still can work out how to make this thing work.

Flora Graham

Exactly, it can find the visual signals out in a very, very unfamiliar landscape and it can use a technique of moving itself around, which is to move its body into quadrants of the tank rather than propelling in its normal way, in order to get where it wants to go. So, this is really demonstrating the flexibility of this animal’s mind and an animal that, let’s be honest, is kind of notorious for being a bit of a simpleton – now probably an unearned reputation as this one has shown. Their talents are full of untapped depths.

Noah Baker

I really love when you get a story that, when I first heard it, I thought, ‘Surely grant money could be better spent than this.’ And then as you explained it more I thought, ‘Ah, that’s actually a really deep and kind of fascinating insight into the way that the world works.’ And so, I like that I got that transition within the space of one goldfish-based story.

Flora Graham

Well, you have to see the video. That’s the key. This is one of these videos that you can just watch it when you need like a little bit of a break from the day and a reminder that there is joy and beauty in the world.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Flora, I think that’s the perfect place to leave this week’s podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. And, as I say, we’ll put links to all of these stories and where you can sign up for the Nature Briefing in this week’s podcast’s show notes. We’re back to our regular kind of scheduled podcast next week. But look out in your podcast feed for a very special Podcast Extra that Noah has been working on with our colleague Geoff Marsh.

Noah Baker

I should emphasise, I did very little here. This was really all Geoff Marsh and a wonderful ecologist talking about recreating soundscapes. So, studying soundscapes can help teach us a lot of things about the world, about the sort of diversity of creatures out there. But also, soundscapes can impact us in lots of ways. They can impact our wellbeing. And this ecologist is trying to use citizen science data, where people have counted how many birds there were, for example, and use that to recreate lost soundscapes. So, you can listen to the soundscapes of the past based on these data, so you can understand how soundscapes have changed. And then he’s using that potentially to then start projecting forwards and listen to what soundscapes of the future might be like. It’s a really beautiful piece. I’d recommend either digging out or borrowing some nice headphones if you can to listen to it because it’s really immersive and it’s really worth a listen.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

It really is a lovely, lovely thing, so look out for that wherever you get your podcasts. But that’s all for this week and all that remains to be said is, Noah and Flora, thank you so much.

Noah Baker

You’re very welcome, Ben.

Flora Graham

Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.