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William E. Stoney Jr., NASA engineer during space race, dies at 96

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William E. Stoney Jr., an aeronautical engineer who made important contributions to NASA’s mission during the space race as a developer of early rockets and a lead engineer on the Apollo program, died May 28 at a rehabilitation center in Ashburn, Va. He was 96.

The cause was complications from a fall, said his son Robert Stoney.

Mr. Stoney was in his early 20s, fresh out of MIT following service as an airplane mechanic during World War II, when he joined NASA’s predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in 1949.

Working at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., he joined a group of engineers renowned for their imaginative work on pilotless aircraft and rocket technology.

Mr. Stoney thus was in a key position when the space race began in the 1950s, pitting the two Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, in a contest to reach what was seen as the final frontier.

A critical moment — and an embarrassing setback for the United States — came in 1957 with the successful Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.

“We were disappointed we weren’t the first,” Mr. Stoney reflected years later, “but in another sense it reassured us that we were really on the right track — that, boy, we really could get supported from now on, because this was important that the U.S. continue to try to catch up, and we were part of that game.”

Mr. Stoney became the program manager overseeing the development of the solid-propellant rocket known as Scout. NASA today describes the rocket as “one of the most successful boosters” in the history of the space agency, with payloads producing “critical advancements in atmospheric and space science.”

In the 1960s, as ambitions shifted to manned spaceflight, Mr. Stoney was appointed chief of advanced space vehicle concepts at NASA’s Washington headquarters and led the advanced spacecraft technology division in Houston. He served in top engineering roles during the Apollo program, whose signal accomplishment was the moon landing by astronaut Neil Armstrong in 1969. That year, Mr. Stoney received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for his work on the Apollo mission.

After he had “rubbed the moon dust” out of his eyes, as he put it, Mr. Stoney became director of NASA’s earth observations programs in 1973, leading the development of satellites for meteorological purposes as well as the monitoring of atmospheric pollution and earth resources.

William Edmund Stoney Jr. was born on Sept. 13, 1925, in Terre Haute, Ind., and grew up in Charleston, S.C., and in Brooklyn. His father was a civil engineer who worked on the Panama Canal, and his mother was a homemaker. Observing her young son’s interest in flight, she once accompanied Mr. Stoney to an airfield where he flew aboard an airplane piloted by pioneering aviator Clarence D. Chamberlin.

After Army Air Forces service in the Pacific during World War II, Mr. Stoney received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949. He received two master’s degrees, one in aeronautical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1951 and another in industrial management from MIT in 1962.

Mr. Stoney retired from NASA in 1978 and later worked in the private sector, including with the RCA Corp. on advanced robotics and with Noblis, a nonprofit technology company.

Mr. Stoney’s first marriage, to Roberta Beckner, ended in divorce. His second wife, Joy Scafard Stoney, died in 2016 after 51 years of marriage.

Survivors include three stepchildren from his second marriage whom he adopted, Catherine Stoney of Vienna, Va., Jeanne Stoney-Disston of Weston, Conn., and Robert Stoney of Herndon, Va.; a son from his second marriage, John Stoney of Austin; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Stoney had been a member since his 20s of the American Society for Psychical Research and had amassed a collection of more than 1,000 books and other materials on the paranormal and the possibility of life after death.

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Science

James Webb Space Telescope coverage wins Pulitzer Prize

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Science writer Natalie Wolchover has received a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for her work at Quanta Magazine explaining the intricate story of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in December.

Wolchover is a senior writer and editor for Quanta who has been there since the magazine’s inception in 2013. From 2010 to 2012, she was a staff writer (opens in new tab) for Space.com’s sister site Live Science. The Pulitzer, awarded May 9 to the magazine with a special mention for Wolchover, was given in the category of explanatory reporting. 

The Pulitzer committee awarded the 2022 Prize for Explanatory Reporting “for coverage that revealed the complexities of building the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research,” the organization stated (opens in new tab).

Live updates: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mission
Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope works in pictures

Wolchover was recovering from COVID-19 when the news came through to her. “I’m lying in bed in a COVID daze struggling to believe that this is real and not a fever dream,” she joked on Twitter (opens in new tab).

“It’s a wonderful recognition for our whole team, and for the ethos of science journalism,” she added of the prize-winning story (opens in new tab), titled “The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works.”

Wolchover’s tale elegantly traces the bedeviling engineering process that produced the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion observatory that launched more than a decade late and very much over budget. She notes that even after launch (which took place Dec. 25, 2021; the article was published Dec. 3), Webb still had to face numerous issues during its commissioning.

For example, she describes how the telescope was delicately folded into the rocket to be unfurled in space for the long journey to a deep-space location, where a sunshield must be executed just right to keep the telescope shielded from sun that would interfere with infrared observations.

“The sunshield is both an infrared telescope’s only hope and its Achilles heel. In order to unfurl to large enough proportions without weighing down a rocket, the sunshield must consist of thin fabric,” she wrote.

After discussing Webb’s tiny mass compared with a ground-based telescope, a necessity to get the groundbreaking observatory to space, she elaborated on the fabric issue further.

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“Nothing about building a giant yet lightweight infrared-sensing spacecraft is easy, but the unavoidable use of fabric makes it an inherently risky affair,” Wolchover said. “Fabric is, engineers say, ‘nondeterministic,’ its movements impossible to perfectly control or predict. If the sunshield snags as it unfurls, the whole telescope will turn into space junk.”

Happily, Webb’s deployment went just fine and after nearly five straight months of commissioning in space, NASA coincidentally also announced in May that the observatory is within the ‘homestretch’ of the 1,000-step commissioning period. The first science images from the space telescope are expected in July.

Wolchover also notes in the article the groundbreaking research Webb will perform if all goes to plan, as it probes the early universe, seeks the first galaxies and otherwise tries to understand the forces that shaped the cosmos.

A comparison of views of the same part of the sky as seen by NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope and the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech (left), NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI (right))

Wolchover was a staff writer at LiveScience, a sister publication of Space.com, between 2010 and 2012. Notable stories she penned for LiveScience in her last few months there included outlining the top mysteries of physics (opens in new tab), a discussion concerning whether the Voyager 1 spacecraft had exited the solar system (opens in new tab), and the physics of the first supersonic space dive (opens in new tab). Wolchover also occasionally wrote for Space.com.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Tufts University and studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, according to her Live Science biography, and before the Pulitzer she won numerous other journalistic prizes. She was the 2016 winner of the  Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, and the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics. 

“Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science,” her Live Science biography states (opens in new tab).

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 



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Science

Dress to impress: US Space Force releases new grooming and uniform guidelines

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The U.S. Space Force aims to make sure its gallant Guardians are turned out in high style with impeccable grooming standards to match their impressive official outfits and insignias.

The Space Force has delivered a revamped grooming and uniform policy that will ensure that America’s sixth military branch has a distinctive style, identity and culture.

As announced in a press release (opens in new tab) last week, the Space Force now requires that all Guardians in active service represent a unifying theme in their appearance. The new updates were devised with the help of input from Guardians across the entire chain of command, Space Force officials said.

Related: The Space Force’s prototype dress uniforms look like something out of science fiction

The U.S. Space Force recently updated its uniform requirements for Guardians. (Image credit: U.S. Space Force)

“Guardians have been waiting a long time for this policy to drop, and I couldn’t be happier to get it out there and start getting this stuff on the shelves,” Space Force Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman said in the press release.

“I appreciate their connection, which brought us these ideas, and the character they’ve shown waiting patiently for us to work through the policy process,” Towberman said. “It’s time to space it up!”

The policy outlines new decorative items that Guardians can choose to display on their interim service dress uniforms, temporary togs that will be used until new Space Force dress uniforms arrive.  

The new uniform choices and accoutrements include: an enlisted rank insignia;
a hexagonal nametag; a hexagonal U.S. lapel insignia for enlisted Guardians; distinctive service hat badges for officers and enlisted personnel; and Space Force “Delta, Globe and Orbit” buttons.

Insignia used by the U.S. Space Force. (Image credit: U.S. Space Force)

According to the press release, the new grooming guidelines include:

  • Adjusting mustache restrictions to the outer corners of the mouth in a horizontal line, rather than vertical, “and no more than ¼ inch [0.6 centimeters] from the end of the corner of the horizontal plane.”
  • Increasing color options for nail polish and lipstick colors to “allow maximum variations for all female skin tones.” 
  • Allowing men “to wear inconspicuous concealer/foundation to cover up scars/blemishes.”
  • Expanding the tattoo policy to match those of the Space Force’s sister services. Neck and hand tattoos are explicitly allowed.

The new grooming and uniform updates result from negotiations and suggestions presented at the Space Force’s first-ever uniform board, which was held last year. They’re intended to spruce up the temporary formal outfit and nurture an immediate identification with the space-centric agency as Guardians.

With these new updated dress and grooming codes, the Space Force is obviously well aware of appearances and intends for its Guardians to stand out in a military crowd on Earth and beyond. Semper Supra!

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Science

The First Privately Funded Killer Asteroid Spotter Is Here

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Gigantic asteroids have smashed into the Earth before—RIP dinosaurs—and if we’re not watching out for all those errant space rocks, they could crash into our world again, with devastating consequences. That’s why Ed Lu and Danica Remy of the Asteroid Institute started a new project to track as many of them as possible.

Lu, a former NASA astronaut and executive director of the institute, led a team that developed a novel algorithm called THOR, which harnesses massive computing power to compare points of light seen in different images of the night sky, then matches them to piece together an individual asteroid’s path through the solar system. They’ve already discovered 104 asteroids with the system, according to an announcement they released on Tuesday.

While NASA, the European Space Agency, and other organizations have their own ongoing asteroid searches, all of them face the challenge of parsing telescope images with thousands or even 100,000 asteroids in them. Some of those telescopes don’t or can’t take multiple images of the same region on the same night, which makes it hard to tell if the same asteroid is appearing in multiple photos taken at different times. But THOR can make the connection between them.

“What’s magical about THOR is, it realizes that out of all those asteroids, this one in a certain image, and this one in another image four nights later, and this one seven nights later are all the same object and can be put together as the trajectory of a real asteroid,” Lu says. This makes it possible to track the object’s path as it moves, and to determine if it’s on a trajectory bound for Earth. Such a formidable task wouldn’t have been possible with older, slower computers, he adds. “This is showing the importance of computation in going forward in astronomy. What’s driving this is that computation is becoming so powerful and so cheap and ubiquitous.”

Astronomers typically spy asteroids with something called a “tracklet,” a vector measured from multiple images, typically taken within an hour. These often involve an observing pattern with six or more images, which researchers can use to reconstruct the asteroid’s route. But if the data is incomplete—say, because a cloudy night obstructs the telescope’s view—then that asteroid will remain unconfirmed, or at least untrackable. But that’s where THOR, which stands for Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, comes in, making it possible to ascertain the path of an asteroid that would have otherwise been missed.

While NASA benefits from telescopes and surveys dedicated to spotting potentially hazardous asteroids, other data sets abound. And THOR can use almost any of them. “THOR makes any astronomical data set a data set where you can search for asteroids. That’s one of the coolest things about the algorithm,” says Joachim Moeyens, cocreator of THOR, and an Asteroid Institute fellow and graduate student at the University of Washington. For this initial demonstration, Moeyens, Lu, and their colleagues searched billions of images taken between 2012 and 2019 from telescopes managed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, many by a sensitive camera mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope in the Chilean Andes.

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Technology

Dead Space creator’s sci-fi horror The Callisto Protocol is out in December

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Dead Space creator Glen Schofield’s very Dead-Space-like sci-fi horror The Callisto Protocol finally has a release date and is heading to PS4, PS5, Xbox, and PC on 2nd December this year.

The Callisto Protocol, which was officially unveiled back in December 2020, is a third-person horror game set in 2320. Its action unfolds within the confines of the Black Iron prison colony on Jupiter’s moon Callisto, and – needless to say – suffocating terror and “terrifying secrets” ensue.

We’ve only seen a single cinematic of The Callisto Protocol since its intriguing 2020 reveal, so it’s nice to finally, properly see the thing in action courtesy of its brand-new release date trailer – which includes a smattering of gameplay – below. It looks like appropriately atmospheric, deliciously icky stuff – and, yes, not entirely dissimilar to Dead Space.


The Callisto Protocol – Release Date Trailer.

There’s not a whole lot more to report on the game at present, although that will most certainly change as its 2nd December release date grows nearer.

One thing we do know, however, thanks to recent confirmation from Schofield, is that The Callisto Protocol – which is being developed by Striking Distance Studios for PUBG publisher Krafton – will no longer be attempting to squeeze itself into the PUBG universe, which, to be honest, always sounded like a highly dubious plan.

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Science

NASA just bought the rest of the space station crew flights from SpaceX

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Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft are ready to launch NASA’s Crew-4 mission.

Trevor Mahlmann

NASA said this week that it plans to purchase five additional Crew Dragon missions from SpaceX to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

Although the space agency’s news release does not specifically say so, these may be the final flights NASA needs to keep the space station fully occupied into the year 2030. As of now, there is no signed international agreement to keep the station flying until then, but this new procurement sends a strong signal that the space agency expects the orbital outpost to keep flying that long.

The announcement also suggests that SpaceX will fly more than twice as many crews to the space station than the other partner in NASA’s commercial crew program, Boeing. Under the new agreement, SpaceX would fly 14 crewed missions to the station on Crew Dragon, and Boeing would fly six during the lifetime of the station.

Let’s run down the math on that. SpaceX has already launched four operational crew missions to the space station, dating to the November 15, 2020, launch of the Crew-1 mission. SpaceX has two more flights under its original crew contract with NASA. In February 2022, NASA awarded fixed-price contracts for the Crew-7, Crew-8, and Crew-9 missions to SpaceX. The latest announcement would bring the total number of Crew Dragon missions to 14.

As for Boeing, it has yet to fly an operational mission to the station. The company recently completed a largely successful uncrewed test flight in May. Looking ahead, Boeing will probably complete a crewed flight test of Starliner late this year or early in 2023 and then fly its first operational mission sometime in 2023, or possibly later if issues are discovered on the crewed test flight.

“Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test-2 went very well and we hope to be able to certify the Starliner system in the near future,” said Phil McAllister, director of commercial space at NASA, said in the agency’s news release. “However, we will need additional missions from SpaceX to implement our strategy of having each commercial provider flying alternating missions once per year.”

NASA has yet to announce the purchase of additional Starliner missions. This seems prudent, as Boeing has yet to fully demonstrate Starliner’s capabilities with crew on board. But based on the numbers of this week’s announcement, it now seems probable that there are no additional crewed missions to award to Boeing.

Why? Because NASA only plans to fly two crewed space station missions a year, with four astronauts aboard each. SpaceX would be contracted for 10 additional missions, and Boeing has six on the books. There are eight years of lifetime left in the space station if it stops flying in 2030. While additional modifications to these contracts are always possible, NASA appears to have booked all of the rides it needs for a station lifetime into 2030.

This does not necessarily mean that Starliner will fly just six crewed missions. Boeing signaled its intent to also use the vehicle for private astronaut missions, likely to commercial space stations under development. For example, Boeing is a partner on Blue Origin’s “Orbital Reef” space station project.

But it is worth noting that at present Starliner is only capable of flying on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket. Boeing has only secured enough launches to complete its original six operational Starliner missions for NASA before the Atlas V rocket is retired. This means that, to fly Starliner into orbit, Boeing would have to pay money to human rate United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, or some other vehicle. Boeing has not definitively outlined its plans for any post-Atlas V missions on Starliner.

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Science

Webb Space Telescope’s First Full-Color Images Are Just Weeks Away

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Long before Webb even launched from French Guiana, we’ve been waiting for this moment: the first full-color images from this cutting-edge space telescope. NASA announced yesterday that those pictures will be available on July 12, along with some spectroscopic data.

“The release of Webb’s first full-color images will offer a unique moment for us all to stop and marvel at a view humanity has never seen before,” said Eric Smith, a Webb program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a NASA release.

Webb launched on December 25 and arrived at its observation point in space—a place called L2, a million miles from Earth—one month later. Since then, NASA scientists (as well as scientists at the European and Canadian space agencies, who are partners on the telescope mission) have been hard at work preparing the machine to do science.

The telescope’s primary science goals are to study the birth of stars and the rise of planetary systems, to learn about the evolution of galaxies and local objects like exoplanets, and to investigate the earliest sources of light in the universe—the very first stars and galaxies.

“Our goals for Webb’s first images and data are both to showcase the telescope’s powerful instruments and to preview the science mission to come,” said astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in the same release. “They are sure to deliver a long-awaited ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public.”

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NASA has been tight-lipped about what Webb’s first color images will show, though we got a clue last month, when the agency released some remarkable shots of the Large Magellanic Cloud taken by Webb’s MIRI instrument and held a briefing on what is to come. From that press conference, we know that the images (called “early release observations”) will be of Webb science targets. But the exact subjects will remain a “surprise” until the images are released in July, Pontoppidan said last month.

The first images are only a month away, but many will follow thereafter. Only planned to last five years, the Webb mission may go for as long as 20 years, thanks to fuel saved during an ultra-precise launch.

More: NASA Releases Ridiculously Sharp Webb Space Telescope Images

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Science

Russia launches new cargo ship to International Space Station

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Update: Russia’s Progress 81 cargo ship is chasing the International Space Station for a planned docking at 9:03 a.m. EDT (1303 GMT). NASA’s docking webcast will begin in the video stream above at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT).

Russia launched a new robotic cargo mission to the International Space Station early Friday (June 3) on the country’s first resupply mission to the orbiting lab since it invaded Ukraine earlier this year. 

The uncrewed Progress 81 freighter launched into a clear, blue afternoon sky atop a Russian-built Soyuz rocket at 5:32 a.m. EDT (0932 GMT) from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where the local time was 2:32 p.m. in the afternoon. 

“It was a perfect launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome,” NASA spokesperson Sandra Jones said during live launch commentary from the agency’s Mission Control center in Houston.  

Related: How Russia’s Progress spaceships work (infographic) 

Russia remains a partner in the International Space Station (ISS) program despite its ongoing war on Ukraine, even though its chief Dmitry Rogozin has repeatedly threatened to leave the program, which is a collaboration of five different space agencies and 15 countries. In late March, just weeks after its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, the country returned NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei to Earth as scheduled on a Soyuz spacecraft. That landing followed the launch of three cosmonauts to the station as part of its Expedition 66 and 67 missions.

“NASA TV provides operational cover of all International Space Station launches in order to provide transparency and allow mission support personnel to maintain situational awareness necessary for safe and sustained operation of the International Space Station,” Jones said. 

Progress 81 will circle the Earth twice on its way to the space station, with docking set for 9:03 a.m. EDT (1303 GMT) at the aft end of the Russian-built Zvezda module. You can watch the docking live on Space.com; coverage of those activities will begin at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT).

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying the uncrewed Progress 81 cargo ship launches into orbit from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on June 3, 2022. (Image credit: NASA TV)

Many of Russia’s space partnerships have fallen apart in the wake of the nation’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. 

Soyuz rockets no longer launch from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, for example, and Russia stopped selling Russian-made rocket engines to American companies. But Russia remains an integral part of the ISS program, as the Progress 81 launch shows.

Progress 81 is carrying 5,551 pounds of supplies for the station’s seven-person Expedition 67 crew. That includes about 3,214 pounds of dry cargo like food, clothing and gear; 1,323 pounds of propellant, 926 pounds of water and 80 pounds of nitrogen, Jones said.

The launch follows the departure of a previous Russian cargo ship at the space station. Progress 79 undocked from the station on Wednesday (June 2) and burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, carrying with it a load of trash and unneeded items, Jones said.

A view of the Earth from Russia’s Progress 81 cargo ship after its successful launch into orbit on June 3, 2022. One of the spacecraft’s solar arrays is visible unfolded at left. (Image credit: NASA TV)

Progress 81 will be followed in relatively short succession by another cargo flight — SpaceX’s robotic CRS-25 mission, which is scheduled to launch next Friday (June 10). And the ISS was recently visited by another uncrewed spacecraft as well — Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which conducted a crucial test flight to the orbiting lab from May 19 to May 25.

That May mission, called Orbital Test Flight 2 (OFT-2), was likely the last big hurdle that Boeing had to clear before NASA certifies Starliner to carry astronauts. The capsule’s first crewed flight could come before the end of the year, provided analysis of OFT-2 data turns up nothing worrisome, Boeing and NASA officials have said. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated on June 3 with the results of the Progress 81 cargo ship launch. A new target launch date of June 10 for SpaceX’s CRS-25 cargo mission was added on June 2.

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).  



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Science

First Images From NASA’s Webb Space Telescope

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrup Grumman

These first images from the James Webb Space Telescope will mark the beginning of Webb’s science operations, in which excited astronomers will have the opportunity to use Webb to explore the early universe,

James Webb Space Telescope artist’s conception. Credit: NASA-GSFC, Adriana M. Gutierrez (CI Lab)

First Images From NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Coming Soon

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), will release its first full-color images and spectroscopic data on July 12, 2022. As the largest and most complex observatory ever launched into space, Webb has been going through a six-month period of preparation before it can begin science work, calibrating its instruments to its space environment and aligning its mirrors. This careful process, not to mention years of new technology development and mission planning, has built up to the first images and data: a demonstration of Webb at its full power, ready to begin its science mission and unfold the infrared universe.

“As we near the end of preparing the observatory for science, we are on the precipice of an incredibly exciting period of discovery about our universe. The release of Webb’s first full-color images will offer a unique moment for us all to stop and marvel at a view humanity has never seen before,” said Eric Smith, Webb program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These images will be the culmination of decades of dedication, talent, and dreams – but they will also be just the beginning.”

Behind the Scenes: Creating Webb’s First Images

Deciding what Webb should look at first has been a project more than five years in the making, undertaken by an international partnership between NASA, ESA, CSA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, home to Webb’s science and mission operations.

“Our goals for Webb’s first images and data are both to showcase the telescope’s powerful instruments and to preview the science mission to come,” said astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at STScI. “They are sure to deliver a long-awaited ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public.”

Once each of Webb’s instruments has been calibrated, tested, and given the green light by its science and engineering teams, the first images and spectroscopic observations will be made. The team will proceed through a list of targets that have been preselected and prioritized by an international committee to exercise Webb’s powerful capabilities. Then the production team will receive the data from Webb’s instrument scientists and process it into images for astronomers and the public.

“I feel very privileged to be a part of it,” said Alyssa Pagan, a science visuals developer at STScI. “Typically, the process from raw telescope data to final, clean image that communicates scientific information about the universe can take anywhere from weeks to a month,” Pagan said.

What Will We See?

While careful planning for Webb’s first full-color images has been underway for a long time, the new telescope is so powerful that it is difficult to predict exactly how the first images will look. “Of course, there are things we are expecting and hoping to see, but with a new telescope and this new high-resolution infrared data, we just won’t know until we see it,” said STScI’s lead science visuals developer Joseph DePasquale.

Early alignment imagery has already demonstrated the unprecedented sharpness of Webb’s infrared view. However, these new images will be the first in full color and the first to showcase Webb’s full science capabilities. In addition to imagery, Webb will be capturing spectroscopic data – detailed information astronomers can read in light. The first images package of materials will highlight the science themes that inspired the mission and will be the focus of its work: the early universe, the evolution of galaxies through time, the lifecycle of stars, and other worlds. All of Webb’s commissioning data – the data that was taken while aligning the telescope and preparing the instruments – will also be made publicly available.

What’s Next?

Science! After capturing its first images, Webb’s scientific observations will begin, continuing to explore the mission’s key science themes. Teams have already applied through a competitive process for time to use the telescope, in what astronomers call its first “cycle,” or first year of observations. Observations are carefully scheduled to make the most efficient use of the telescope’s time.

These observations mark the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations – the work it was designed to do. Astronomers will use Webb to observe the infrared universe, analyze the data collected, and publish scientific papers on their discoveries.

Beyond what is already planned for Webb, there are the unexpected discoveries astronomers can’t anticipate. One example: In 1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope launched, dark energy was completely unknown. Now it is one of the most exciting areas of astrophysics. What will Webb discover?

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.



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New Physics Theory Suggests Black Holes Are Key to Universe’s Expansion and Contraction Cycles

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The universe is expanding. No one with any expertise in astronomy or physics disagrees with that fact.

Likewise, nobody really disagrees that, at some point many billions of years in the future, the universe is going to expand too far—and run out of energy for further expansion. At that point, something has to change. That’s where the disagreement begins.

There’s a new wrinkle in that cosmological argument, and it’s a doozy. According to a new study from cosmologists Daniela Pérez and Gustavo Romero, both from the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía, the universe has been repeatedly expanding and contracting, and big black holes are some of the only things that have survived these endless cycles of destruction and renewal. These cycles are part of what cosmologists call a possible “cosmological bounce.”

A mathematical model of a theoretical black hole is the centerpiece of Péerez and Romero’s peer-reviewed study, which was published last month in the science journal Physical Review D.

“Our main result is that the solution represents a dynamical black hole that exists at all epochs of the bouncing cosmological model,” they wrote.

In other words, Peérez and Romero’s black hole survived even when everything around it got wiped out as the universe collapsed on its way to an eventual rebound.

It’s a compelling finding. The question of a black hole’s role in a bouncing universe “is clearly interesting,” Leandros Perivolaropoulos, a physicist at the University of Ioannina in Greece who was not involved with the study, told The Daily Beast, “and this paper may be viewed as an initial attempt to address it.”

But beware: There are a lot of assumptions baked into Peérez and Romero’s argument. It’s possible that, at the moment a universe bounces from contraction to expansion, all the rules that guide our understanding of physics go out the window. We might be trying to fathom the unfathomable.

“General relativity itself breaks down at both the black hole singularity and the cosmological bounce singularity,” Perivolaropoulos said. “Thus any conclusion based on it can not be taken seriously.”

In other words, at the moment the universe collapses to its smallest size right before bouncing back, gravity would stop functioning normally. That’s what we mean by a singularity: an exception to the laws of physics. We have no idea how a black hole would behave when the rules no longer apply.

Peérez and Romero’s methods “have a significant potential for improvement, to put it mildly,” Perivolaropoulos added.

“General relativity itself breaks down at both the black hole singularity and the cosmological bounce singularity. Thus any conclusion based on it can not be taken seriously.”

— Leandros Perivolaropoulos, University of Ioannina

To be clear, the underlying idea that the universe repeatedly expands and contracts is not new. A cosmological bounce is one of several leading theories among cosmologists who study the origin and fate of the universe.

In fact, at least one team of scientists even believes our 13.7-billion-year-old universe is at the end of the most recent expansion phase, and could start contracting again in a hundred million years or so on its way to a fresh bounce in a few billion, or tens of billions, of years.

Alternative theories for ways the universe might end include the universe slowing down and freezing, collapsing in on itself or spinning apart into countless, fragmentary pocket universes. Amid all the options, it’s clear why the cosmological bounce is attracting a lot of interest. It’s an elegant way of explaining some of the weirder things we see all around us in space.

For one, it might help explain why, in a universe that’s mostly uniformly empty, we have these weird, scattered clumps of stuff. Galaxies. Stars. Planets. People. Irregularities in space that are the byproducts of the endless expansion and contraction.

The bounce might also make sense of the biggest black holes. Specifically, the “supermassive” variety that are billions of times more massive than our sun that exert such a powerful gravitational force on the space around them that not even light can escape.

So far we’ve spotted two of these huge black holes using a new global array of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope. One was observed at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. The other was spotted at the heart of Messier 87, a galaxy 54 million light-years away.

A black hole contains the closest thing to a singularity—an exception to accepted rules of physics—that we can directly observe with our telescopes. In the dark, impossibly dense heart of a black hole, our understanding of the universe breaks down. Like Perivolaropoulos said.

There’s something special about an object that big and dense. And that something special might help the biggest black holes survive each time the universe bounces and everything else gets compacted into a kind of smooth paste of matter and energy.

Their survival could be key. Maybe, just maybe, it’s no accident that black holes endure, and retain their unique weirdness, when everything around them contracts into homogeneity. Maybe the black holes are one of the reasons why the universe is capable of bouncing back after one of its once-every-30-billion-years-or-so contractions.

According to Pérez and Romero, there are reasons to believe big black holes, still intact after a cosmological bounce, help the universe rebuild by feeding matter back into space and mixing up the newly-expanding matter with their energy.

“If black holes get through the bounce, they can produce perturbations that would give rise to structure and early galaxy formation in the expanding phase,” they wrote. Black holes can act as engines of creation or re-creation, if you will—helping form galaxies, stars and planets in a rebounding galaxy.

“Maybe the black holes are one of the reasons why the universe is capable of bouncing back after one of its once-every-30-billion-years-or-so contractions.”

It’s an appealing idea. Especially in light of another theory gaining credibility (in parallel with the idea of a cosmological bounce) that there are supermassive black holes at the center of every galaxy. We just haven’t found them all yet.

To be fair, Pérez and Romero aren’t the first cosmologists to explore the relationship between a bouncing universe and big black holes. Bernard Carr and Timothy Clifton from Queen Mary University of London, alongside Alan Coley from Dalhousie University in Canada, have been writing about black holes surviving cosmological bounces for years now. “The mathematics we did suggest it’s possible,” Coley told The Daily Beast.

The difference is that, in the model from Coley and his coauthors, the black holes are embedded in the surrounding structure of the contracting universe rather than being contained inside it. That would make it easier for the black holes to endure even as the stuff inside the universe’s structure collapses in on itself.

In Pérez’s and Romero’s thinking, the black holes are inside the structure. “They’re looking at a slightly different model,” Coley said. In this conception of the bouncing universe, the black holes are even tougher than anyone imagined before–and potentially more important to the universe’s fresh expansion.

If there’s peril in the corner of cosmology that Pérez and Romero share with Coley and his coauthors, it’s that hard data on bouncing universes and enduring supermassive black holes is pretty thin. Our space probes are few and far between. We can see only so far with older telescopes.

To get a better handle on a possible black-hole-assisted cosmological bounce, we need to find more black holes. Especially big ones at the centers of galaxies. We also need better measurements of the background radiation of the universe. A fine reading of the radiation might point to cycles of expansion and contraction.

The good news is, these observations might be possible soon. The new BICEP Array, a suite of four radio telescopes under construction at the South Pole, could give us good radiation readings starting in the next few years. And we can expect more images (and even some movies) of big black holes from the Event Horizon Telescope.

If cosmologists such as Pérez, Romero, and Coley start finding black holes everywhere, and also register the telltale radiation patterns of a bouncing universe, then we might need to start making peace with the idea that everything we can see and imagine is a lot less unique than we previously thought.

In fact, we might be living in the third, hundredth or thousandth version of the universe after repeated bounces, each one fueled in part by ever-bigger black holes.

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