877 segments
We have tackled many strange stories on 60 minutes, but perhaps none like this.
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It's the story of the U.S. government's grudging acknowledgement of unidentified aerial phenomena,
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UAP, more commonly known as UFOs.
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After decades of public denial, the Pentagon now admits there's something out there,
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and the U.S. Senate wants to know what it is.
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The Intelligence Committee has ordered the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary
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of Defense to deliver a report on the mysterious sightings by next month.
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So what you're telling me is that UFOs unidentified flying objects are real.
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Bill, I think we're beyond that already.
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The government has already stated for the record that they're real.
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I'm not telling you that.
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The United States government is telling you that.
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Luis Elizondo spent 20 years running military intelligence operations worldwide in Afghanistan,
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the Middle East, and Guantanamo.
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He hadn't given UFOs a second thought until 2008.
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That's when he was asked to join something at the Pentagon called the Advanced Aerospace
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Threat Identification Program, or A-TIP.
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The mission of A-TIP was quite simple.
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It was to collect and analyze information involving anomalous aerial vehicles.
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What I guess is an vernacular, you call them UFOs.
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You know how this sounds.
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It sounds nutty, wacky.
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Look, Bill, I'm not telling you that it doesn't sound wacky.
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What I'm telling you is real.
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The question is, what is it?
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What are its intentions?
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What are its capabilities?
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Lead away in the Pentagon, A-TIP was part of a $22 million program sponsored by then Senate
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Majority Leader Harry Reid to investigate UFOs.
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When Elizondo took over in 2010, he focused on the national security implications of unidentified
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aerial phenomena documented by US service members.
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Imagine a technology that can do six to seven hundred G-forces that can fly at 13,000
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hours, that it can evade radar, and that can fly through air and water and possibly space.
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And oh, by the way, it has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces,
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and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity.
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That's precisely what we're seeing.
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Elizondo tells us A-TIP was a loose-knit mix of scientists, electro-optical engineers,
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avionics, and intelligence experts, often working part-time.
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They combed through data and records and analyzed videos like this.
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A Navy Aircrew struggled to lock on to a fast-moving object off the US Atlantic coast in 2015.
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Recently released images may not convince UFO skeptics, but the Pentagon admits it doesn't
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know what in the world this is.
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What do you say to the skeptics?
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It's refracted light, weather balloons, a rocket being launched, Venus.
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In some cases there are simple explanations for what people are witnessing, but there
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are some that are not.
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We're not just simply jumping to a conclusion that's saying, oh, that's a UAP out there.
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We're going through our due diligence.
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Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed?
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Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that's conducting reconnaissance?
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Ultimately, when you have exhausted all those what-ifs, and you're still left with the
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fact that this is in our airspace and it's real, that's when it becomes compelling and
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that's when it becomes problematic.
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Former Navy pilot, Lieutenant Ryan Graves, calls whatever is out there a security risk.
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He told us his F-18 squadron began seeing UAP's hovering over restricted airspace, southeast
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of Virginia Beach in 2014, when they updated their jet's radar, making it possible to zero
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in with infrared targeting cameras.
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So you're seeing it both with the radar and with the infrared, and that tells you that
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there is something out there.
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Pretty hard to spoof that.
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These photographs were taken in 2019 in the same area.
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The Pentagon confirms these are images of objects it can't identify.
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Lieutenant Graves told us pilots training off the Atlantic coast see things like that all
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Every day for at least a couple of years.
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Wait a minute, every day for a couple of years?
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I don't see an exhaust for them.
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Following this one, off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida in 2015 captured on a targeting camera
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by members of Graves Squadron.
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There's a news thing.
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We're all going against the wind.
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The wind's a hundred point out.
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You can sort of hear the surprise in their voices.
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It seems like a broke character a bit.
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And we're just kind of amazed at what they were seeing.
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What do you think when you see something like this?
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This is a difficult one to explain.
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You have high altitudes.
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You have propulsion, right?
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I don't know what it is.
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He told us pilots speculate they are one of three things.
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Secret U.S. technology, an adversary spy vehicle, or something otherworldly.
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I would say, you know, the highest probability is it's a threat observation program.
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Are you going to be Russian or Chinese technology?
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I don't see why not.
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I am worried, frankly.
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You know, if these were attacked by jets from other countries that were hanging out
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up there, it would be a massive issue.
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But because it looks slightly different, we're not willing to actually look at the problem
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We're happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there watching us every day.
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The government has ignored it, at least publicly, since closing its project Blue Book
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investigation in 1969.
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But that began to change after an incident off Southern California in 2004, which was
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documented by radar, by camera, and four naval aviators.
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We spoke to two of them.
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David Fraver, a graduate of the Top Gun Naval Flight School, and commander of the F-18 Squadron
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on the USS Nimitz, and flying it as wing, Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, who has never spoken
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publicly about the encounter.
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I never wanted to be a national TV.
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So why are you doing this?
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Because I was in a government aircraft, because I was on the clock.
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And so I feel a responsibility to share what I can, and it is unclassified.
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It was November 2004, and the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was training about 100 miles
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southwest of San Diego.
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Over a week, the advanced new radar on a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, had detected what
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operators called multiple anomalous aerial vehicles over the horizon, descending 80,000
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feet in less than a second.
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On November 14, Fraver and Dietrich, each with a weapons system officer in the backseat,
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were diverted to investigate.
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They found an area of roiling whitewater, the size of a 737, in an otherwise calm blue
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So as we're looking at this, her backseater says, hey, Skipper, do you?
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And about that got out, I said, dude, do you see that thing down there?
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And we saw this little white tic-tac looking object, and it's just kind of moving above
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the whitewater area.
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As Dietrich circled above, Fraver went in for a closer look.
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Sort of spiraling down.
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The tic-tac still point north south, it goes, and just turns abruptly and starts mirroring
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So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up.
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So it's mimicking your moves.
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Yeah, it was where we were there.
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He said it was about the size of his F-18, with no markings, no wings, no exhaust plumes.
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That's too honestly how close I can get.
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So I go like this, and it's climbing still, and when it gets right in front of me, it just
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What are you thinking?
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So your mind tries to make sense of it.
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I'm going to categorize this as maybe helicopter or maybe a drone, and when it disappeared,
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I mean, it was just...
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Did your backseaters see this, too?
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There was four of us in the airplanes literally watching this thing for roughly about
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Seconds later, the Princeton re-acquired the target.
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After crew managed to briefly lock onto it with a targeting camera, before it zipped off
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You know, I think that overbears we've sort of said, hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't
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know that I would have come back and said anything, because it sounds so crazy when I say it.
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You understand that reaction?
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If you've had some people tell me, you know, and you say that, you can sound crazy.
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I'll be on, I'm not a UFO guy.
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But from what I hear you guys saying, there's something.
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Oh, there's definitely something that...
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I don't know who's building it.
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Who's got the technology, who's got the brains, but there's...
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There's something out there that was better than our airplane.
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The aircraft filed reports, then, like the mysterious flying object, the Nimitz encounter
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Nothing was said or done officially for five years.
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The Lou Elisando came across the story and investigated.
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We spend millions of dollars in training these pilots, and they are seeing something that
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Furthermore, that information's being backed up on electrical data, like gun camera footage,
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and if I rate our data, now to me, that's compelling.
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Inside the Pentagon, his findings were met with skepticism.
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ATIPS funding was eliminated in 2012, but Elisando says he and a handful of others kept
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the mission alive until, finally, frustrated he quit the Pentagon in 2017.
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But not before getting these three videos declassified.
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And then things took a stranger turn.
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I tried to help my colleague, Lou Elisando, elevate the issue in the department and actually
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get it to the Secretary of Defense.
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Christopher Mellon served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for
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President Clinton and George W. Bush, and had access to top secret government programs.
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So it's not us, that's one thing we know.
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I can say that with a very high degree of confidence, in part because of the positions
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I held in the department, and I know the process.
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Mellon says he grew concerned nothing was being done about UAPs, so he decided to do something.
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In 2017, as a private citizen, he surreptitiously acquired the three Navy videos Elisando had
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declassified and leaked them to the New York Times.
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It's bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself has to do something like that to
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get a national security issue like this on the agenda.
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He joined forces with now civilian Lou Elisando, and they started to tell their story to anybody
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The history channel to members of Congress.
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We knew and understood that you had to go to the public, get the public interested to get
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Congress interested, to then circle back to the Defense Department and get them to start
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taking a look at it.
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This past August, the Pentagon resurrected a tip.
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It's now called the UAP Task Force.
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Service members now are encouraged to report strange encounters, and the Senate wants answers.
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Anything that enters an airspace that's not supposed to be there is a threat.
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After receiving classified briefings on UAPs, Senator Marco Rubio called for a detailed
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This past December, while he was still head of the Intelligence Committee, he asked the
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Director of National Intelligence and the Pentagon to present Congress an unclassified
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report by next month.
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This is a bizarre issue.
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The Pentagon and other branches of the military have a long history of dismissing this.
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What makes you think that this time is going to be different?
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We're going to find out when we get that report.
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There's a stigma in Capitoli Hill.
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Some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kind of giggle when you
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But I don't think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental
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What do you want us to do about this?
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I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously.
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I want us to have a process to analyze the data.
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Every time it comes in, that there'd be a place where this is catalogued and constantly
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Until we get some answers.
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Maybe it has a very simple answer.
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We first told you about the tiny helicopter ingenuity in the one-ton rover Perseverance
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nearly a year ago before they left Earth.
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They've come a very long way since then.
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In February, they landed in a hazardous and previously unexplored part of Mars called
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the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance will be looking for signs of ancient life.
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Last month, ingenuity disconnected from Perseverance's belly and made history, performing the first
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flights ever in the atmosphere of another planet.
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It's hard to imagine, but worth remembering as you watch what we're about to show you that
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this all happened millions of miles away in outer space.
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Last month, in this desolate Martian crater, 170 million miles from Earth, Perseverance
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posed for a selfie with ingenuity, the little helicopter it had just dropped off.
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Two weeks later, the rover's cameras recorded ingenuity's historic first flight, hovering
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ten feet off the ground for thirty seconds.
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It may not look like much, but for those who've worked so long to make it happen, it was
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a reason to rejoice.
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Project manager Mimi Ong led the team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California that's
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been working on ingenuity for six years.
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How hard is it to fly helicopter in Mars?
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Very, very, very hard.
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We really truly started with the question of, is it possible?
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A lot of people thought it could not be done.
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This is really counterintuitive.
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You need atmosphere, the place to push atmosphere to get lived.
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The atmosphere on Mars is completely different than the world.
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The atmosphere at Mars is so thin.
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The room we're in, right?
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It's compared to that.
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It was 1% of the atmospheric density over there.
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The question of, really, can you generate enough lift to really lift up anything?
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That was a fundamental question.
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In subsequent flights, ingenuity has gone longer and farther, traveling for about two
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minutes and nearly the length of three football fields.
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It is a triumph, not only for NASA, but for its partners in the private sector who help
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make various parts of the helicopter.
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Don't let it go, don't freak out.
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Matt Keenan has a history of making unusual things that conflite as an engineer at a company
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called Aerovironment, which produces drones for military and civilian use.
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I mean, that's incredible.
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Ten years ago, for a military research project, Keenan and his team created this robotic hummingbird,
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which has a tiny camera on board.
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Oh my God, that's amazing.
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Keenan and engineer Ben Puypenberg led the Aerovironment team, the created ingenuities,
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rotors, motors, and landing gear.
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Why was this so challenging?
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Because it has to be a spacecraft as well as an aircraft, and flying it as an aircraft
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on Mars is pretty challenging because of the density of the air that's similar to about
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Earth at 100,000 feet.
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How do you go about it?
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Well, so building everything extremely lightweight is really, really critical.
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The helicopters blades, for example, are made of a styrofoam-like material coated with carbon
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They're stiff and strong.
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But a sense of how lightweight and stiff that is.
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Yeah, there's nothing.
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But incredibly light.
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This is the first time they've shown an outsider this version of ingenuity, which they plan
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to use for education and research.
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Here on Earth, Terry's blades are spinning at about 400 revolutions per minute.
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On Mars in the thin atmosphere, they'd have to spin six times faster to generate the
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Ingenuity costs $85 million to build and operate.
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Terry, a lot less, but it's still nerve-racking to be handed its controls.
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You can push it all the way to the right if you want.
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I'll bring it up a little bit now.
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The joysticks we use to fly Terry are of no use on Mars.
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Radio signals take too long to get there.
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So, over now, I've switched you out.
[0:17:57 - 0:18:00] ▶
And we'll go back to the...
[0:18:00 - 0:18:03] ▶
Even someone is good at flying drones and hummingbirds as Matt Keenan couldn't fly a helicopter
[0:18:03 - 0:18:08] ▶
Here's what happened in 2014 in a test chamber that replicated the atmosphere on Mars when
[0:18:09 - 0:18:14] ▶
Keenan tried to use a joystick to fly an early version of ingenuity.
[0:18:14 - 0:18:18] ▶
So much for that vehicle.
[0:18:21 - 0:18:23] ▶
So this very quick demonstration is a human being can't respond quickly enough to control
[0:18:23 - 0:18:28] ▶
So engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory equipped ingenuity with a computerized
[0:18:30 - 0:18:34] ▶
system that allows it to stabilize itself and navigate on its own.
[0:18:34 - 0:18:39] ▶
In 2016, the new system aceed the chamber test.
[0:18:39 - 0:18:43] ▶
The blades are being commanded in a 400-500 times per second.
[0:18:43 - 0:18:48] ▶
They proved it could fly, but ingenuity still had to weigh under four pounds and fit in
[0:18:48 - 0:18:53] ▶
the belly of perseverance.
[0:18:53 - 0:18:55] ▶
And it had to be tough enough to survive the journey to Mars.
[0:19:01 - 0:19:02] ▶
On July 30, 2020, perseverance and ingenuity took off from Cape Canaveral.
[0:19:04 - 0:19:10] ▶
Nearly seven months later, as this simulation shows, the spacecraft's heat shield hit the
[0:19:10 - 0:19:15] ▶
Martian atmosphere, going 12,000 miles per hour.
[0:19:15 - 0:19:19] ▶
And perseverance ready to execute entry to sudden landing on her own.
[0:19:19 - 0:19:24] ▶
As he sat in the control room, Al Chen, the leader of the landing team, had absolutely
[0:19:24 - 0:19:29] ▶
Radio signals would take about 11 minutes to travel from Earth to Mars.
[0:19:30 - 0:19:35] ▶
The spacecraft was pre-programmed to descend, maneuver, and pick a landing site on its
[0:19:35 - 0:19:39] ▶
All the work his colleagues hoped to do on Mars would be impossible if his part of the mission
[0:19:40 - 0:19:45] ▶
How long have you been working on this mission?
[0:19:46 - 0:19:49] ▶
I've been working on it for nine years or so.
[0:19:49 - 0:19:50] ▶
That's a lot of work for seven minutes of...
[0:19:51 - 0:19:53] ▶
If nine years of work, seven minutes a tear.
[0:19:53 - 0:19:56] ▶
It's done if the parachute doesn't work.
[0:19:56 - 0:19:57] ▶
No one wants to be the guy that drops at the time.
[0:19:58 - 0:20:01] ▶
No landing by a spacecraft has ever been recorded as well as this one.
[0:20:01 - 0:20:06] ▶
There were six cameras capturing it all from different angles.
[0:20:06 - 0:20:09] ▶
The parachute deployed, then the heat shield fell away like a lens cap, and perseverance
[0:20:09 - 0:20:14] ▶
got its first look at the ground.
[0:20:14 - 0:20:18] ▶
This is not a simulation.
[0:20:18 - 0:20:20] ▶
This is what it looks like to parachute onto Mars.
[0:20:20 - 0:20:25] ▶
How fast is it moving at this point?
[0:20:25 - 0:20:26] ▶
Yeah, we're still going about 350 miles an hour and still slowing down.
[0:20:26 - 0:20:29] ▶
So it looks gentle here, but in fact, it's falling at more than 300 miles an hour.
[0:20:29 - 0:20:34] ▶
We're heading straight down at near race-card speeds.
[0:20:35 - 0:20:37] ▶
Below lay a series of safe landing spots, but the wind was blowing the spacecraft towards
[0:20:37 - 0:20:42] ▶
more treacherous territory to the east.
[0:20:42 - 0:20:45] ▶
The Perseverance sent a message to Earth saying the thrusters it needed to slow down might
[0:20:45 - 0:20:50] ▶
not be working properly.
[0:20:50 - 0:20:52] ▶
So you get a reading saying the jets that are going to help it slow down and control
[0:20:52 - 0:20:57] ▶
the landing that they're not working.
[0:20:57 - 0:20:59] ▶
Nothing you can do, right?
[0:21:00 - 0:21:01] ▶
Everything's already happened.
[0:21:01 - 0:21:02] ▶
That's the mind-bending part of this, right?
[0:21:02 - 0:21:04] ▶
You are sweating now.
[0:21:04 - 0:21:05] ▶
I'm right back there again.
[0:21:06 - 0:21:08] ▶
How's it about 300 meters?
[0:21:09 - 0:21:11] ▶
To Alcheng's relief, Perseverance's computerized landing system did what it was designed to
[0:21:11 - 0:21:16] ▶
It found a suitable landing spot even in rocky terrain.
[0:21:17 - 0:21:21] ▶
And despite the warning, the thrusters worked.
[0:21:21 - 0:21:24] ▶
You can see them kicking up dust as they fired to slow the spacecraft down.
[0:21:24 - 0:21:29] ▶
The descent stage, known as the Skycrain, lowered Perseverance to the ground.
[0:21:29 - 0:21:34] ▶
It hovered for a moment and flew off to crash a safe distance away.
[0:21:34 - 0:21:38] ▶
And there goes the descent stage.
[0:21:38 - 0:21:40] ▶
It's a tough time confirmed.
[0:21:40 - 0:21:41] ▶
Perseverance, take place on a surface of mind.
[0:21:41 - 0:21:45] ▶
So at that point, big sigh of relief.
[0:21:45 - 0:21:47] ▶
You know, I almost collapsed over this console.
[0:21:47 - 0:21:50] ▶
Ever since Perseverance landed on the red planet, a team of engineers, programmers, and
[0:21:50 - 0:21:55] ▶
scientists here on Earth have been living on Mars time.
[0:21:55 - 0:21:58] ▶
It's their job to monitor the rover's health and tell it where to go and how to search
[0:21:58 - 0:22:03] ▶
for signs of life, while Perseverance sleeps to conserve energy during the freezing
[0:22:03 - 0:22:07] ▶
The team on Earth analyzes the photographs and instrument readings it sent back.
[0:22:09 - 0:22:14] ▶
They then prepare a list of things for it to do the following morning when it wakes up.
[0:22:14 - 0:22:18] ▶
And so it's just after midnight on Mars, the vehicle is asleep.
[0:22:18 - 0:22:22] ▶
Project manager Matt Wallace explained that a day on Mars is 40 minutes longer than on
[0:22:22 - 0:22:27] ▶
The team's schedule is constantly changing.
[0:22:28 - 0:22:30] ▶
So people here are Mars night shift workers.
[0:22:30 - 0:22:35] ▶
Yeah, that's a good way to think of it.
[0:22:35 - 0:22:37] ▶
But I mean, working night shift is tough enough, but this is a night shift that's constantly
[0:22:37 - 0:22:41] ▶
On Perseverance's fourth day on Mars, it swiveled the powerful camera on its mask and took
[0:22:45 - 0:22:50] ▶
A space enthusiast named Sean Doran put the images together, set them to music, and
[0:22:52 - 0:22:58] ▶
posted the movie on YouTube.
[0:22:58 - 0:23:01] ▶
Even one of the top scientists on the project was moved when he saw it.
[0:23:01 - 0:23:05] ▶
You know, I went and got a beer and watched this thing scroll by.
[0:23:05 - 0:23:08] ▶
And that moment, that was the moment when I felt like I was there.
[0:23:08 - 0:23:13] ▶
Ken Farley leads the science team that will direct Perseverance through the Jezero Crater.
[0:23:13 - 0:23:18] ▶
An area that scientists have long wanted to search for signs of ancient life may be hidden
[0:23:18 - 0:23:23] ▶
The oldest evidence of life on Earth is about three and a half billion years old.
[0:23:25 - 0:23:29] ▶
Those rocks were deposited in a shallow sea.
[0:23:29 - 0:23:33] ▶
This crater that you see here was a lake three and a half billion years ago.
[0:23:33 - 0:23:38] ▶
So we are looking at the same environment in the same time period on two different planets.
[0:23:38 - 0:23:43] ▶
And if it's determined, however long in the future, that no, there was not ever life,
[0:23:43 - 0:23:49] ▶
what does that mean?
[0:23:49 - 0:23:50] ▶
The place where Perseverance landed here in Jezero Crater is the most habitable time period
[0:23:50 - 0:23:56] ▶
in Mars and the most habitable environment that we know about.
[0:23:56 - 0:24:00] ▶
This is as good as it gets.
[0:24:00 - 0:24:01] ▶
So these are our current understanding of what Mars has to offer.
[0:24:01 - 0:24:05] ▶
And if we don't find life here, it does make us worry that perhaps it doesn't exist
[0:24:05 - 0:24:10] ▶
Perseverance hasn't strayed far from its landing site yet, but its telescopic camera
[0:24:11 - 0:24:16] ▶
has already spotted a large number of boulders that Ken Farley says he didn't expect to see
[0:24:16 - 0:24:21] ▶
in the middle of an ancient lake.
[0:24:21 - 0:24:23] ▶
So this has surprised you.
[0:24:23 - 0:24:26] ▶
So what did those boulders tell you?
[0:24:27 - 0:24:28] ▶
The most reasonable interpretation is a flood.
[0:24:28 - 0:24:31] ▶
We don't have fast-flowing water out in the middle of the lake.
[0:24:31 - 0:24:34] ▶
You get fast-flowing water in a river.
[0:24:34 - 0:24:37] ▶
And so what that's telling us is there was a river that was capable of transporting boulders
[0:24:37 - 0:24:42] ▶
So what the lake would have gone down perhaps and then later on there was a flood?
[0:24:43 - 0:24:48] ▶
Perseverance was supposed to leave ingenuity behind after a 30-day demonstration of
[0:24:50 - 0:24:54] ▶
The NASA officials recently said they'll keep the duo together for another month to
[0:24:55 - 0:25:00] ▶
explore how rovers and helicopters might work together in the future.
[0:25:00 - 0:25:05] ▶
Fastest of Perseverance was designed to travel is a tenth of a mile per hour.
[0:25:05 - 0:25:11] ▶
Ingenuity has already gone 80 times faster according to Project Manager Mimi Ohm.
[0:25:11 - 0:25:16] ▶
Adding an aerial vehicle, a flying vehicle for space exploration will be game-taining.
[0:25:16 - 0:25:22] ▶
It frees you in a way.
[0:25:22 - 0:25:23] ▶
So a flying vehicle, a road of craft, would allow us to get to places we simply can't
[0:25:25 - 0:25:28] ▶
Sites of steep cliffs, you know, inside deep crevices.
[0:25:29 - 0:25:32] ▶
After Perseverance explores the floor of Jezero crater, it'll head towards what's believed
[0:25:32 - 0:25:37] ▶
to be the remnant of an ancient river delta, where billions of years ago conditions should
[0:25:37 - 0:25:42] ▶
have been right for microorganisms to exist.
[0:25:42 - 0:25:46] ▶
As this simulation shows, the rover's robotic arm can collect about 40 core samples of rock
[0:25:46 - 0:25:51] ▶
that'll be sealed in special tubes and left on the planet's surface.
[0:25:51 - 0:25:56] ▶
The plan is to send another mission to Mars to retrieve the tubes and bring them back
[0:25:56 - 0:26:00] ▶
In about ten years, Ken Farley says, scientists examining those samples may be confronted
[0:26:01 - 0:26:07] ▶
with a new and perplexing question.
[0:26:07 - 0:26:10] ▶
How do you look for life that may not be life as you know it?
[0:26:10 - 0:26:15] ▶
We've never had to do that before.
[0:26:15 - 0:26:17] ▶
We've never had to actually ask the question, is there a form of life that we can't even
[0:26:17 - 0:26:22] ▶
Yeah, we're going to have to conceive of it.
[0:26:23 - 0:26:24] ▶
I think that's the whole point of this.
[0:26:24 - 0:26:26] ▶
We're going to have to start conceiving of life as we don't know it.
[0:26:26 - 0:26:29] ▶
If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will be making tracks on Mars for years to
[0:26:29 - 0:26:33] ▶
Since it's carrying the first working audio microphones on the red planet, we'll leave
[0:26:34 - 0:26:39] ▶
you with what it sounds like, as the one-ton rover slowly moves across the vast, lonely
[0:26:39 - 0:26:45] ▶
This December 22nd may become known as the Day the Universe changed.
[0:27:01 - 0:27:07] ▶
That Wednesday, NASA expects to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and
[0:27:07 - 0:27:14] ▶
most expensive instrument ever flown.
[0:27:14 - 0:27:17] ▶
One hundred times more powerful than the 31-year-old Hubble Telescope, Webb can see back in time
[0:27:17 - 0:27:24] ▶
all the way to the Let There Be Light moment, that instant when a cold, dark universe ignited
[0:27:24 - 0:27:31] ▶
Well, somehow that's a lot bigger than I imagined.
[0:27:35 - 0:27:41] ▶
A year ago, we were among the last humans to see the telescope much as it will appear
[0:27:43 - 0:27:48] ▶
After our visit, it was packed away for a journey of a million miles far beyond the moon,
[0:27:49 - 0:27:56] ▶
to life forever in the grasp of the sun.
[0:27:56 - 0:28:00] ▶
The operating life is how long?
[0:28:00 - 0:28:03] ▶
It's designed for five and a half years with a goal of ten years, so that means we carry
[0:28:03 - 0:28:08] ▶
enough stuff on there to last for ten years.
[0:28:08 - 0:28:13] ▶
Amy Lowe is a systems engineer who took us up in the clean room at Northrop Grumman in
[0:28:13 - 0:28:19] ▶
Radondo Beach, California.
[0:28:19 - 0:28:21] ▶
We had to invent it, design it, build it, and hand put it together.
[0:28:21 - 0:28:26] ▶
At the bottom of the spacecraft, that silver shroud is a parasol, big is a tennis court,
[0:28:26 - 0:28:33] ▶
to shield Webb from the sun.
[0:28:33 - 0:28:35] ▶
Above, there are 21 feet of gold-plated mirrors, six times bigger than Hubble's mirror,
[0:28:35 - 0:28:42] ▶
to catch the earliest starlight in creation.
[0:28:42 - 0:28:46] ▶
There are 18 of these hexagonal mirrors, but when you fold them out, they all work in
[0:28:46 - 0:28:53] ▶
concert as one mirror.
[0:28:53 - 0:28:55] ▶
All 18 images will form one very nice solid image.
[0:28:56 - 0:29:01] ▶
That image would be invisible to the human eye.
[0:29:01 - 0:29:05] ▶
Like a night vision camera, Webb is designed to see heat in for red light, because that's
[0:29:05 - 0:29:12] ▶
the only signature left from the stars at the edge of time.
[0:29:12 - 0:29:16] ▶
Even that glow will be so dim, the mirrors will have to squint for hours to expose an
[0:29:16 - 0:29:23] ▶
How much confidence do you have?
[0:29:24 - 0:29:27] ▶
You know, my job is to worry.
[0:29:27 - 0:29:31] ▶
I personally feel confident that we have thought of everything.
[0:29:31 - 0:29:38] ▶
Thinking of everything took more than 25 years and 10 billion dollars.
[0:29:38 - 0:29:44] ▶
Engineer Amy Lowe explained the challenge.
[0:29:44 - 0:29:47] ▶
In my mind, the biggest engineering challenge was to build a sunshield capable of shielding
[0:29:47 - 0:29:54] ▶
the optics, the mirrors, and the instrument on Webb.
[0:29:54 - 0:29:58] ▶
How do you build something big, but lightweight?
[0:29:58 - 0:30:01] ▶
The sunshield keeps Webb cold and dark.
[0:30:01 - 0:30:04] ▶
Any infrared heat from the sun or earth would blind the telescope.
[0:30:04 - 0:30:09] ▶
The five layers are made of gossamer sheets not unlike mylar birthday balloons.
[0:30:09 - 0:30:16] ▶
The layer facing the sun is layer one, and layer one reaches about 230 degrees Fahrenheit,
[0:30:16 - 0:30:22] ▶
so a pretty warm oven like if you wanted to cook them a rang or something.
[0:30:22 - 0:30:26] ▶
And on the on the telescope side?
[0:30:26 - 0:30:28] ▶
On the telescope side, it gets to negative 370 degrees Fahrenheit.
[0:30:28 - 0:30:33] ▶
There's a roughly 600 degree difference between one side of the heat shield and the other.
[0:30:33 - 0:30:39] ▶
Yes, it's amazing that it's able to do this with nothing more than these layers.
[0:30:39 - 0:30:47] ▶
The engineering is amazing, but the science may reveal the universe.
[0:30:47 - 0:30:53] ▶
Since the beginning, the big bang, the arrow of time has flown nearly 14 billion years.
[0:30:53 - 0:31:00] ▶
Webb may see all the way back to the first 100 million, the baby universe.
[0:31:00 - 0:31:07] ▶
Powerful telescopes.
[0:31:07 - 0:31:08] ▶
Amber Straun is an astrophysicist on the project.
[0:31:08 - 0:31:12] ▶
Telescopes really are time machines.
[0:31:12 - 0:31:14] ▶
They literally allow us to see into the past.
[0:31:14 - 0:31:18] ▶
And the reason for that is just due to the nature of how light travels.
[0:31:18 - 0:31:22] ▶
Right from the sun takes about eight minutes to get to the earth.
[0:31:22 - 0:31:25] ▶
So we're seeing the sun as it was eight minutes ago.
[0:31:25 - 0:31:28] ▶
And you can sort of think about stepping that further out into the universe.
[0:31:28 - 0:31:32] ▶
So when we walk out under the stars and look above us, we're not seeing the stars as they
[0:31:32 - 0:31:38] ▶
We're seeing them as they were perhaps millions of years ago.
[0:31:39 - 0:31:43] ▶
Because it took that long for the light to reach the earth.
[0:31:44 - 0:31:47] ▶
How much do we know about the universe?
[0:31:48 - 0:31:52] ▶
Everything we know about, everything we can see, me and you, everything on the planet,
[0:31:52 - 0:31:57] ▶
all the hundreds of billions of other galaxies.
[0:31:57 - 0:32:00] ▶
All of that only makes up about 5% of the universe.
[0:32:00 - 0:32:04] ▶
The rest of it that other 95% we have no idea what it is.
[0:32:04 - 0:32:08] ▶
That 95% the unknown is all around us like a ghost.
[0:32:08 - 0:32:14] ▶
Nearly all the cosmos is made up of what physicists call in desperation, dark matter and dark
[0:32:14 - 0:32:21] ▶
Scientists infer they must exist because they're the best explanation for how galaxies form
[0:32:24 - 0:32:31] ▶
So we know that dark matter is sort of the scaffolding of the universe.
[0:32:32 - 0:32:37] ▶
It's the structure on which galaxies sit.
[0:32:37 - 0:32:40] ▶
And if there wasn't dark matter, there wouldn't be galaxies and there wouldn't be us.
[0:32:40 - 0:32:45] ▶
What might the web telescope reveal about dark matter?
[0:32:45 - 0:32:49] ▶
It's like we have this 14 billion year old story of the universe, but we're missing that
[0:32:49 - 0:32:53] ▶
And web was specifically designed to allow us to see those very first galaxies that formed
[0:32:55 - 0:33:01] ▶
Now galaxies are born and then they evolve, they change over time.
[0:33:03 - 0:33:07] ▶
And this way that galaxies change must rely critically on dark matter.
[0:33:07 - 0:33:13] ▶
And web is going to allow us to observe that process of galaxy evolution in much more
[0:33:13 - 0:33:18] ▶
The promise of discovery shielded web on what's already been a treacherous journey.
[0:33:19 - 0:33:26] ▶
It was to launch seven years ago, but delays come with a machine this ambitious.
[0:33:26 - 0:33:32] ▶
Because of cost overruns, web was canceled in 2011 by the House Appropriations Committee,
[0:33:32 - 0:33:38] ▶
but it was saved in the Senate.
[0:33:38 - 0:33:41] ▶
Its namesake is James Webb, head of NASA in the 1960s, who made science a top priority.
[0:33:41 - 0:33:48] ▶
What are the stakes?
[0:33:48 - 0:33:49] ▶
What's writing on that rocket with web?
[0:33:49 - 0:33:52] ▶
We talk about what's at stake.
[0:33:52 - 0:33:53] ▶
It really is NASA's reputation to take on a mission that is as challenging as web and
[0:33:53 - 0:33:59] ▶
Bill Oaks and Greg Robinson run the program.
[0:34:01 - 0:34:04] ▶
Oaks was an engineer on Hubble.
[0:34:04 - 0:34:06] ▶
Robinson has supervised NASA quality and performance.
[0:34:06 - 0:34:10] ▶
If you want to be bold and get the kind of science we're after, you have to make the investment.
[0:34:10 - 0:34:16] ▶
And it's going to answer two big questions, fastrial physics, where do we come from and
[0:34:16 - 0:34:20] ▶
And we're looking forward to getting those results.
[0:34:21 - 0:34:24] ▶
Is web going to work?
[0:34:24 - 0:34:25] ▶
Yes, it's going to work.
[0:34:25 - 0:34:26] ▶
I have very high confidence.
[0:34:26 - 0:34:28] ▶
I am 100% confident.
[0:34:28 - 0:34:29] ▶
Because when I look at the testing that we have done over the years and the type of engineering
[0:34:31 - 0:34:37] ▶
that went into it, you build a sense of confidence that you know
[0:34:37 - 0:34:40] ▶
What are you most concerned about?
[0:34:42 - 0:34:44] ▶
Unfolding the entire telescope is what you worry about.
[0:34:44 - 0:34:47] ▶
The observatory had to be folded into an Arianne 5 rocket just 16 feet wide.
[0:34:47 - 0:34:54] ▶
It's wrapped today tight as a rosebud.
[0:34:54 - 0:34:57] ▶
In flight, more than 40 systems must blossom with perfection, including Amy Loves never
[0:34:57 - 0:35:04] ▶
invented before sunshield.
[0:35:04 - 0:35:07] ▶
All five layers will be folded up and held in place by pins.
[0:35:07 - 0:35:12] ▶
How many pins are there?
[0:35:12 - 0:35:14] ▶
There's 107 of these membering release devices and pins that hold all five layers.
[0:35:14 - 0:35:21] ▶
Pin to this structure here called the UPS, all total 107.
[0:35:21 - 0:35:25] ▶
And as you're unfolding, how many of those can fail?
[0:35:25 - 0:35:30] ▶
There is literally no room for error.
[0:35:35 - 0:35:36] ▶
We test and we do a lot of analysis to ensure that each and every single one of these will
[0:35:36 - 0:35:44] ▶
$10 billion rides on those pins.
[0:35:46 - 0:35:49] ▶
The Hubble Telescope, 340 miles up, could be reached with a wrench.
[0:35:49 - 0:35:54] ▶
Web, at a million miles, is beyond repair.
[0:35:54 - 0:35:59] ▶
Bill Oaks told us that if something does get stuck, there is an emergency plan.
[0:35:59 - 0:36:05] ▶
We develop algorithms to essentially make we call it the shimmy.
[0:36:05 - 0:36:08] ▶
We do a little shake on the telescope and we can rock it back and forth.
[0:36:08 - 0:36:12] ▶
We have no one we call the twirl, which can actually spin the telescope either clockwise
[0:36:13 - 0:36:17] ▶
or counterclockwise to help shake things loose.
[0:36:17 - 0:36:20] ▶
So you're going to do what I do with devices when they're not working, you're going to shake
[0:36:20 - 0:36:23] ▶
Can I do the same thing?
[0:36:25 - 0:36:26] ▶
If 107 pins release, the mirrors synchronize and 10,000 things go right.
[0:36:27 - 0:36:34] ▶
Web will be limited only by about 10 years of fuel for pivoting and pointing.
[0:36:34 - 0:36:40] ▶
Canada contributed the aiming system that will guide Web to wonders, far and near.
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More than a thousand astronomers around the world are competing for telescope time.
[0:36:47 - 0:36:52] ▶
Heidi Hamill was granted 100 hours.
[0:36:52 - 0:36:55] ▶
I have so many questions.
[0:36:55 - 0:36:59] ▶
My particular focus is objects in our solar system.
[0:36:59 - 0:37:04] ▶
Hamill told us that light is full of information.
[0:37:04 - 0:37:08] ▶
Web can define the chemistry of a place by analyzing its wavelengths of light.
[0:37:08 - 0:37:14] ▶
What is the atmospheric water content of Mars?
[0:37:14 - 0:37:18] ▶
How does it change with time?
[0:37:18 - 0:37:20] ▶
What drives the chemistry in the upper atmosphere of Neptune?
[0:37:20 - 0:37:25] ▶
Can we see if there's water coming out of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn?
[0:37:25 - 0:37:32] ▶
There are just an infinite number of questions I want to answer.
[0:37:32 - 0:37:36] ▶
Astrophysicist Natalie Vitalia also has time on Web.
[0:37:36 - 0:37:40] ▶
She'll be looking at planets beyond our solar system.
[0:37:40 - 0:37:44] ▶
One average, every star in the galaxy has at least one planet.
[0:37:44 - 0:37:50] ▶
That means that there are more planets in the galaxy than there are stars, hundreds of billions of planets.
[0:37:50 - 0:37:56] ▶
And with that many planets, Vitalia is sure Web could find some with the chemistry and conditions of life.
[0:37:56 - 0:38:04] ▶
There happens to be one planetary system.
[0:38:04 - 0:38:08] ▶
The star has seven planets orbiting it.
[0:38:08 - 0:38:11] ▶
And the star is only about 40 light years away.
[0:38:11 - 0:38:14] ▶
So it's a great target to study.
[0:38:14 - 0:38:17] ▶
And it has three Earth-sized planets orbiting in what I would call the Goldilocks zone, where life could potentially exist.
[0:38:17 - 0:38:25] ▶
Not too hot, not too cold.
[0:38:25 - 0:38:27] ▶
That's the idea, yes.
[0:38:27 - 0:38:29] ▶
And so this is also one of the very first targets that we're going to observe with Web.
[0:38:29 - 0:38:34] ▶
And what we'll be able to see is their carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
[0:38:34 - 0:38:40] ▶
What are the greenhouse gases?
[0:38:40 - 0:38:41] ▶
Is their carbon dioxide in combination with methane?
[0:38:41 - 0:38:45] ▶
Because that's what Earth has.
[0:38:45 - 0:38:46] ▶
So by looking at these chemical constituents, we might be able to piece together if it's not just a planet in what we call the habitable zone,
[0:38:46 - 0:38:54] ▶
but if it's truly a habitable environment.
[0:38:54 - 0:38:57] ▶
And somebody might ask, why does it matter?
[0:38:57 - 0:39:00] ▶
The end point is to put an end to our cosmic loneliness.
[0:39:00 - 0:39:05] ▶
We want to know if there's life out there.
[0:39:05 - 0:39:07] ▶
Some of the researchers' perspective is Web Evolutionary or Revolutionary.
[0:39:07 - 0:39:15] ▶
Every time you put a new piece of technology into space, or you look at the universe with different eyes,
[0:39:15 - 0:39:23] ▶
you learn something revolutionary, something that you couldn't have even predicted.
[0:39:23 - 0:39:28] ▶
I don't know what those surprises are going to be, but the technology is revolutionary,
[0:39:28 - 0:39:32] ▶
and there will be tremendous surprises that will astound us.
[0:39:32 - 0:39:37] ▶
Web is on the doorstep aboard a European Space Agency rocket.
[0:39:37 - 0:39:42] ▶
Some, including Amy Lowe, may hold their breath as it unfolds itself on the month-long journey to its station around the sun.
[0:39:42 - 0:39:51] ▶
The first images in six months or so will be converted from invisible infrared into pictures suitable for headlines.
[0:39:51 - 0:40:00] ▶
Chances are what we see, we will not understand.
[0:40:00 - 0:40:05] ▶
The very definition of wonder.
[0:40:05 - 0:40:08] ▶
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has hardly opened its eyes, and the universe is new, more mysterious, more beautiful than humanity's dreams.
[0:40:08 - 0:40:29] ▶
The largest telescope ever flown launched into deep space on Christmas Day 2021.
[0:40:29 - 0:40:35] ▶
Its primary mission is to reveal the Let There Be Light moment when the stars and galaxies first ignited after the Big Bang.
[0:40:35 - 0:40:45] ▶
Recently, we got to look at some captivating images as Webb peers back toward the origin of everything.
[0:40:45 - 0:40:55] ▶
This is one of Webb's early deep dives into the cosmos, 250 hours of exposures that expand the imagination.
[0:40:55 - 0:41:07] ▶
And all these little dots are stars?
[0:41:07 - 0:41:09] ▶
All these little dots are galaxies, some of which are bigger than our own.
[0:41:09 - 0:41:13] ▶
Astrophysicist Brent Robertson flew us through 130,000 galaxies, half never seen before,
[0:41:13 - 0:41:22] ▶
enormous swirls of billions of stars each, some like our own Milky Way, and others well out of this world.
[0:41:22 - 0:41:33] ▶
We call this galaxy at the center of the screen the cosmic rose.
[0:41:33 - 0:41:37] ▶
Just by chance it looks like a rose does.
[0:41:37 - 0:41:40] ▶
You can see that dusty red, regular galaxy.
[0:41:40 - 0:41:44] ▶
You know, spaces more crowded than you might think, and actually galaxies wind up interacting with each other.
[0:41:44 - 0:41:49] ▶
They actually will merge together.
[0:41:49 - 0:41:51] ▶
So I'm zooming in now on a pair of galaxies that are merging together, interacting.
[0:41:51 - 0:41:57] ▶
You can see that they're disturbed because the gravity of one galaxy
[0:41:57 - 0:42:01] ▶
yanks the stars out of the other galaxy.
[0:42:01 - 0:42:03] ▶
They're running into each other.
[0:42:03 - 0:42:04] ▶
They're running into each other.
[0:42:04 - 0:42:06] ▶
Robertson of the University of California Santa Cruz helps lead Webb's most ambitious mission,
[0:42:06 - 0:42:13] ▶
the Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey.
[0:42:14 - 0:42:17] ▶
Well, we've discovered the most distant galaxy in the universe, the one that is the furthest
[0:42:18 - 0:42:23] ▶
away from us that we currently know about.
[0:42:23 - 0:42:25] ▶
I'd like to share that with you.
[0:42:26 - 0:42:27] ▶
Can I show you some pictures?
[0:42:27 - 0:42:28] ▶
So as we zoom in, we keep going, we keep going, and now this red splotch that you see there,
[0:42:29 - 0:42:36] ▶
that galaxy, that's a galaxy, that galaxy is more than 33 billion light years away.
[0:42:36 - 0:42:44] ▶
How long after the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, did this galaxy form?
[0:42:44 - 0:42:50] ▶
It's amazing. It's only 320 million years after the Big Bang.
[0:42:50 - 0:42:54] ▶
The most distant galaxy so far, there on the right, doesn't look like much,
[0:42:55 - 0:43:00] ▶
but astronomers can fill textbooks by analyzing the spectrum of its light.
[0:43:00 - 0:43:06] ▶
So we can actually measure things like how fast it's forming stars.
[0:43:07 - 0:43:11] ▶
We can measure the amount of stars in the galaxy.
[0:43:11 - 0:43:13] ▶
We know the size, because we know how far away it is,
[0:43:13 - 0:43:16] ▶
and we know the typical age of the stars in the galaxy.
[0:43:16 - 0:43:19] ▶
The earliest galaxy so far formed when the universe was 2% of its current age,
[0:43:20 - 0:43:26] ▶
and the baby galaxy ignited stars at a furious pace.
[0:43:27 - 0:43:32] ▶
It's like a hummingbird.
[0:43:32 - 0:43:34] ▶
You know, the heartbeat of this galaxy is so rapid.
[0:43:34 - 0:43:37] ▶
What do you mean by that?
[0:43:37 - 0:43:38] ▶
Well, this galaxy is forming stars at about the rate of the Milky Way,
[0:43:38 - 0:43:42] ▶
even though it's 100 times less massive.
[0:43:42 - 0:43:45] ▶
So it really is like a hummingbird.
[0:43:45 - 0:43:47] ▶
The heartbeat of this galaxy is racing.
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T minus 30 seconds in counting.
[0:43:50 - 0:43:52] ▶
More than a few human hearts were racing in 2021,
[0:43:52 - 0:43:56] ▶
as the 10 billion dollar observatory ready for launch.
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Earlier that year, we were among the last to see Webb in California
[0:44:04 - 0:44:10] ▶
before it was folded into a 15-foot wide nose cone.
[0:44:10 - 0:44:14] ▶
Well, somehow that's a lot bigger than I imagined.
[0:44:15 - 0:44:18] ▶
25 years in the making, Webb is named for an early NASA administrator.
[0:44:19 - 0:44:24] ▶
Northrop Grumman engineer Amy Lowe showed us down below the silver colored sunshield.
[0:44:25 - 0:44:32] ▶
Big is a tennis court, and 21 feet of gold-plated mirrors for gathering light.
[0:44:32 - 0:44:39] ▶
There are 18 of these hexagonal mirrors,
[0:44:40 - 0:44:43] ▶
but when you fold them out, they all work in concert as one mirror.
[0:44:44 - 0:44:49] ▶
That's right. All 18 images will form one very nice solid image.
[0:44:49 - 0:44:54] ▶
Deco-lage, lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself.
[0:44:58 - 0:45:04] ▶
James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.
[0:45:04 - 0:45:07] ▶
Webb bloffed on a European rocket into an orbit around the sun a million miles away.
[0:45:08 - 0:45:15] ▶
To set up for observations, engineers used a star to align those mirrors.
[0:45:16 - 0:45:21] ▶
But the image was speckled with what looked like artifacts of digital noise.
[0:45:22 - 0:45:27] ▶
Which forced a closer look.
[0:45:28 - 0:45:30] ▶
These were not artifacts from the detector.
[0:45:31 - 0:45:33] ▶
These were not strange stars.
[0:45:33 - 0:45:35] ▶
The whole of the sky was filled with galaxies.
[0:45:36 - 0:45:39] ▶
There was no empty sky.
[0:45:39 - 0:45:40] ▶
And that's when I went, this telescope's going to be phenomenal.
[0:45:41 - 0:45:44] ▶
Matt Mountain leads Webb's operations as president of the Association of Universities for
[0:45:45 - 0:45:52] ▶
Research in Astronomy.
[0:45:52 - 0:45:53] ▶
What do you mean by that?
[0:45:55 - 0:45:56] ▶
And almost every image we're taking now, we see galaxies everywhere.
[0:45:56 - 0:46:00] ▶
I mean, we took a simple picture of a planet around system, Neptune.
[0:46:01 - 0:46:05] ▶
You know, it was this beautiful orb just sitting there and we saw some rings
[0:46:06 - 0:46:10] ▶
in the background, galaxies again.
[0:46:10 - 0:46:12] ▶
It tells us that the universe is filled with galaxies.
[0:46:13 - 0:46:16] ▶
We knew this theoretically.
[0:46:16 - 0:46:17] ▶
But when you go out to the night sky, we're used to saying,
[0:46:18 - 0:46:20] ▶
well, look up the night sky, we see those stars.
[0:46:22 - 0:46:24] ▶
We can no longer say that.
[0:46:24 - 0:46:25] ▶
We now have to say, look up the night sky
[0:46:25 - 0:46:27] ▶
and there are galaxies everywhere.
[0:46:28 - 0:46:29] ▶
We call it space because we thought there was nothing out there.
[0:46:30 - 0:46:33] ▶
There is no empty sky with James Webb.
[0:46:33 - 0:46:36] ▶
That is what we have discovered.
[0:46:36 - 0:46:37] ▶
Matt Mountain says that Webb is a reminder of how much we do not know.
[0:46:38 - 0:46:42] ▶
For example, galaxies are rushing away from each other at greater and greater speed,
[0:46:43 - 0:46:49] ▶
So scientists infer that there must be unseen elements at work.
[0:46:53 - 0:46:58] ▶
They call them dark energy and dark matter.
[0:46:58 - 0:47:02] ▶
And whenever you hear the term dark energy or dark matter,
[0:47:02 - 0:47:06] ▶
this means we don't know what it is.
[0:47:06 - 0:47:08] ▶
We're not that imaginative, but it is a force.
[0:47:08 - 0:47:10] ▶
It is 95 percent of our universe.
[0:47:10 - 0:47:14] ▶
And we have no idea what it is.
[0:47:14 - 0:47:16] ▶
95 percent of our universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter.
[0:47:18 - 0:47:22] ▶
And we don't know what it is.
[0:47:22 - 0:47:24] ▶
We're lucky if we even understand 4 percent of our universe today.
[0:47:25 - 0:47:29] ▶
Astronomy is a very humbling discipline.
[0:47:30 - 0:47:32] ▶
Humbling, but with Webb.
[0:47:34 - 0:47:36] ▶
This is Purdue University astronomer Dan Millie-Savlovitch,
[0:47:41 - 0:47:46] ▶
star struck and chatting with a colleague.
[0:47:46 - 0:47:49] ▶
Even Wilbur, who's not an astronomer,
[0:47:54 - 0:47:57] ▶
strained to see what the excitement was about.
[0:47:57 - 0:48:00] ▶
Millie-Savlovitch studies exploded stars,
[0:48:01 - 0:48:05] ▶
which were the furnaces that forged the first heavy elements
[0:48:05 - 0:48:09] ▶
from a cosmos of simple helium and hydrogen.
[0:48:09 - 0:48:12] ▶
Every time there's a supernova explosion,
[0:48:13 - 0:48:15] ▶
it's producing the raw materials for life.
[0:48:15 - 0:48:19] ▶
The iron in our blood,
[0:48:19 - 0:48:20] ▶
the calcium in our bones,
[0:48:21 - 0:48:23] ▶
the oxygen that we breathe.
[0:48:23 - 0:48:25] ▶
All that is being manufactured in supernova explosions.
[0:48:28 - 0:48:32] ▶
The late astronomer Carl Sagan used to say
[0:48:32 - 0:48:34] ▶
we're all made of star stuff.
[0:48:34 - 0:48:36] ▶
That's exactly right.
[0:48:36 - 0:48:37] ▶
Webb reveals unprecedented detail at the center of these explosions.
[0:48:38 - 0:48:44] ▶
And that's what Webb is most sensitive to for our purposes.
[0:48:44 - 0:48:48] ▶
Understanding what's happening inside the explosion
[0:48:48 - 0:48:51] ▶
that we couldn't see before,
[0:48:51 - 0:48:53] ▶
because it only comes out in infrared light.
[0:48:53 - 0:48:56] ▶
Infrared light is what Webb is designed to see.
[0:48:57 - 0:49:00] ▶
Like a night vision camera,
[0:49:01 - 0:49:03] ▶
the telescope is sensitive to heat radiation,
[0:49:03 - 0:49:06] ▶
which is all that remains of the light
[0:49:06 - 0:49:09] ▶
reaching us from the dawn of time.
[0:49:09 - 0:49:11] ▶
Trouble is infrared is invisible to the human eye.
[0:49:12 - 0:49:16] ▶
When you first pull up the web data, what does that look like?
[0:49:17 - 0:49:21] ▶
Essentially it looks like a blank screen.
[0:49:22 - 0:49:24] ▶
Alisa Pagan and Joe D. Pasquale are astronomers and science
[0:49:25 - 0:49:31] ▶
imagers for the Space Telescope Science Institute.
[0:49:31 - 0:49:34] ▶
This is what a Webb infrared picture looks like
[0:49:35 - 0:49:39] ▶
until they match the data-filled darkness
[0:49:39 - 0:49:43] ▶
to colors of wonder.
[0:49:43 - 0:49:45] ▶
So we take those longest wavelengths of infrared light
[0:49:45 - 0:49:48] ▶
and give those the red colors.
[0:49:48 - 0:49:49] ▶
The next shortest wavelengths would be green
[0:49:49 - 0:49:51] ▶
and then the shortest wavelengths that we get from Webb
[0:49:51 - 0:49:53] ▶
And so just like how our eyes work,
[0:49:54 - 0:49:56] ▶
we take those three color channels
[0:49:56 - 0:49:58] ▶
combine them together to create
[0:49:58 - 0:49:59] ▶
the full color images that we see from Webb.
[0:49:59 - 0:50:01] ▶
Among their favorite images is this cluster of stars
[0:50:02 - 0:50:06] ▶
with the not-so-wonderous name NGC346.
[0:50:06 - 0:50:10] ▶
Cosmic dust sculpted into ripples
[0:50:12 - 0:50:15] ▶
by interactions between stars
[0:50:15 - 0:50:17] ▶
and the torrentiala nebula,
[0:50:18 - 0:50:21] ▶
a star-burthing nursery on a backdrop of galaxies.
[0:50:21 - 0:50:26] ▶
It occurs to me you're the first two people
[0:50:26 - 0:50:28] ▶
to see these images in human history.
[0:50:28 - 0:50:31] ▶
Yeah, it's quite an honor.
[0:50:31 - 0:50:32] ▶
It is a great honor and it does blow your mind every time.
[0:50:32 - 0:50:35] ▶
There will be many mind-blowing revelations.
[0:50:36 - 0:50:39] ▶
Webb is already the first to find carbon dioxide
[0:50:39 - 0:50:43] ▶
in the sky of a planet 700 light years away.
[0:50:43 - 0:50:47] ▶
It will continue to look for planets with atmospheres
[0:50:47 - 0:50:51] ▶
that might support life.
[0:50:51 - 0:50:52] ▶
On the other end of the timescale,
[0:50:53 - 0:50:56] ▶
astrophysicist Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado Boulder
[0:50:56 - 0:51:00] ▶
thinks her team may have made a discovery
[0:51:00 - 0:51:04] ▶
that she says would break the theory
[0:51:04 - 0:51:07] ▶
of how the early universe formed.
[0:51:07 - 0:51:09] ▶
Either this is wrong or this is a huge discovery
[0:51:10 - 0:51:16] ▶
and we think that it's a huge discovery.
[0:51:16 - 0:51:18] ▶
More observations are needed,
[0:51:19 - 0:51:21] ▶
but Nelson is investigating what may be five giant galaxies
[0:51:21 - 0:51:26] ▶
that appear to have formed much too quickly after the big bang.
[0:51:26 - 0:51:30] ▶
If they're confirmed,
[0:51:31 - 0:51:32] ▶
astronomy may have to revise the timeline of galaxy formation.
[0:51:32 - 0:51:37] ▶
And that's the most exciting piece of this,
[0:51:38 - 0:51:41] ▶
of this telescope, of this remarkable instrument we put in space
[0:51:41 - 0:51:45] ▶
is finding things that we didn't expect,
[0:51:45 - 0:51:48] ▶
that we can't explain because that means that
[0:51:48 - 0:51:50] ▶
we have to revise our understanding of the universe.
[0:51:51 - 0:51:53] ▶
Grant Robertson who showed us the earliest galaxy found so far
[0:51:54 - 0:51:58] ▶
by the James Webb telescope told us the record for the earliest
[0:51:59 - 0:52:03] ▶
How far back can you go to the origins of the universe?
[0:52:05 - 0:52:09] ▶
Well, JWST is so phenomenal that if you spend enough time,
[0:52:09 - 0:52:12] ▶
you could probably find any galaxy that ever formed in the universe.
[0:52:12 - 0:52:16] ▶
It's really that powerful.
[0:52:16 - 0:52:17] ▶
Will the history of astronomy be divided between before web and after web?
[0:52:17 - 0:52:23] ▶
Yes, I believe it will be.
[0:52:23 - 0:52:25] ▶
Matt Mountain who manages web operations told us the observatory may last up to 25 years,
[0:52:26 - 0:52:33] ▶
perhaps long enough to comprehend space and time and the origins of life.
[0:52:33 - 0:52:41] ▶
We're seeing a universe we've never seen before.
[0:52:42 - 0:52:44] ▶
We thought it was there, we hoped it was there, but now we see it for the first time.
[0:52:45 - 0:52:50] ▶