Anticipating the first James Webb images

Now, to space. There’s a few things to be excited about if you’re a keen astronomer at the moment. We’re only days away from the first pictures from the James Webb telescope, there’s an update regarding Voyager 1 and 2, as well as a mystery to solve on the far side of the moon. For this celestial roundup, James Tytko spoke with space science journalist Richard Hollingham of the Space Boffins podcast…

James - So Richard, the time is almost upon us. We'll be seeing the first images from the James Webb telescope later this month. If the rumours are to be believed, they're gonna be something really special. How excited should we be to finally be at this point?

Richard - We should be extremely excited. 10 years ago, they started work on this and building it. In fact, more than 10 years ago, there were 344 single point failures on this mission. So many things that could have gone wrong, but now there it is sitting one and a half million kilometers from earth, looking out into space. We know the mirror is aligned, we know it all works, we know it's sending back data. There are almost certainly those images sitting somewhere being worked on right now. They wouldn't have hyped this and hyped this date and hyped this release if they didn't know it was all going to work. I think the bigger point though, is that the James Webb space telescope is really a step change in what we can see. It's the biggest observatory ever launched in space; 18 mirror segments, six and a half meters across. But it won't be giving us a visible universe like Hubble does, which is what we would see if we had really, really good eyes. It'll be giving - what one scientist I spoke to suggested was - a snakes eye view of the universe, which it will really be seeing an infrared and infrared we can take as heat. So it'll be able to see through a lot of things that currently block our view and because it's so much bigger, bigger collecting area, being able to collect photons pretty much, not quite, but pretty much from the dawn of time. And also give us a sense of atmospheres perhaps around distant planets, distant worlds. I mean, we don't actually know what it'll be able to do. Same with Hubble really, they didn't really know its capabilities until they stuck it up. They started saying, wow, we can see this!

James - There's also been some news circulating that Voyager 1 and 2, the twin space probes which left earth nearly five decades ago, are potentially powering down. Is there some truth to this?

Richard - I think powering downs the wrong word. They are gradually running out of energy. So they have these nuclear batteries on board, essentially generating heat from radioactive sources, converting that into electricity. That's decaying. So they are running out of power. But I just thought I would check - I mean, you know, we're better to check than actually from the spacecraft itself - the spacecraft tweets and it actually says, "while our power budgets will continue to get tighter, our team thinks we can continue to do science for at least another five years. I might get to celebrate my 50th launch anniversary or even operate into the 2030s." So there you go. That's actually from the NASA voyage spacecraft. I mean the reality is they are still sending back data, not a huge amount, they're not that many instruments working on them. I don't quite understand why this story has come up now. There there's been a bit of a data glitch with one of them, but these things happen all the time with spacecrafts. And they're just trying to make sense of that. And even beyond that, once they do finally die - and they will finally die because they will run out of power - they still really are ambassadors to the stars because they've got this information about earth and where we are all attached to the side on these golden records. So Voyager one and Voyager two will exist well long beyond us.

James - And finally, Richard, there's something of a mystery to be solved when it comes to two craters, which have appeared on the far side of the moon. Now we know they've been formed by the discarded stage of a rocket, but it's not clear which. Is there any update on this?

Richard - This is a really interesting story. Isn't it? So two new craters, they know now that they were formed on the 4th March, the initial thinking was they were formed from a discarded SpaceX rocket. That's been dismissed. They're likely to be, but there's been no confirmation of this, from a Chinese rocket stage, a rocket that flew past the moon. And this is all part of the international ambition to go back to the moon.

James - Does it make you a bit sad potentially to reflect on the footprint we're leaving up there? It's not enough for us to just be polluting earth, we've got to ruin parts of the moon as well.

Richard - Yes, we are trashing the earth, we've managed to put a huge amount of space debris around the earth and now we're leaving it on the moon. You have to think, well, the moon's pretty big, it can take it. I think the bigger concern will be actually when we start going to Mars because there's no life on the moon. We know there's no life on the moon, but there's the potential for finding life or the signs of life on Mars. And if we keep sticking stuff there, there's the chance that actually that life might have been brought by us from Earth. I think we've gotta be really careful when we're going to these pristine bodies that we're not contaminating them and not polluting them.