This event take place virtually at 3pm PDT/6pm EDT. Not in PDT or EDT? Check your time zone.
The James Webb Space Telescope originated in a 1995 proposal from the HST & Beyond Committee led by Dr Dressler, as part of a quest to connect our human origins to the births of galaxies 13.4 billion years ago, and to search for habitable worlds like Earth within our Milky Way Galaxy. Dr Dressler will describe the history of this project to build what is arguably the most complex instrument ever, the challenges faced by thousands of engineers and scientists, and the (so far) successful steps to activate and calibrate the telescope and spacecraft, and the commissioning of instrumentation that will deliver extraordinarily deep and powerful observations of stars and galaxies for scientific programs that begin in July 2022. He will explain his own scientific program to measure the growth of the first generation of galaxies from their infancies.