The James Webb Space Telescope will be the largest, most powerful and complex space telescope ever built and launched into space. It will fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe. It’s planned launch is October 31st, 2021.
Mission officials for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, who partnered with The Canadian Space Agency and ESA to build JWST, have announced the selection of the General Observer programs for the telescope’s first year of science, known as Cycle 1. These specific programs will provide the worldwide astronomical community with one of the first extensive opportunities to investigate scientific targets with Webb.
The James Webb Space Telescope is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope, with longer wavelength coverage and greatly improved sensitivity. The longer wavelengths enable Webb to look much closer to the beginning of time and to hunt for the unobserved formation of the first galaxies, as well as to look inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today.
The 286 selected proposals address a wide variety of science areas and will help fulfill NASA’s overarching mission to further our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Webb will begin observing the universe in 2022 after the spacecraft unfolds, travels a million miles, and checks the functioning of all of its instruments.
Webb’s large mirror, near- to mid-infrared sensitivity, and high-resolution imaging and spectroscopic capabilities will reveal parts of the universe that have been hidden so far. General Observer programs selected in this cycle seek to find the first galaxies, explore the formation of stars, and measure physical and chemical properties of planetary systems, including our own solar system.
General Observer time with Webb is extremely competitive. As a result, the proposal selection process conducted by the Telescope Allocation Committee is both rigorous and meticulous. The committee was comprised of nearly 200 members of the worldwide astronomical community who were assigned to 19 different panels covering broad scientific topics. The panels met virtually, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic circumstances, over the course of several weeks. Members additionally spent countless hours outside of formal meetings to assess proposals.
Using dual-anonymous review, where the identities of the proposing investigator and team were concealed, the scientific merit of each proposal was evaluated and ranked. The final, ranked list of selected proposals was presented to the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Director, Dr. Kenneth Sembach, for review and approval.
More than 1,000 proposals were submitted by the November 24, 2020 deadline. Scientists hailing from 44 countries applied for a portion of the 6,000 observing hours available in Webb’s first year, which represents about two-thirds of all Cycle 1 observing time.
Following a rigorous selection process, 286 proposals were selected for Webb’s first year of operations, including ten principal investigators and 72 contributions of co-investigators from Canada. They will be some of the first astronomers in the world to study celestial targets with the most advanced space telescope ever built. Their work will help them discover other worlds, such as exoplanets, learn more about the lifecycles of stars, and paint a picture of the early universe and of galaxies as they evolve through time.
Principal investigators from Canada
- Loïc Albert, Université de Montréal
- Lisa Dang, McGill University
- Maria Drout, University of Toronto
- Olivia Lim, Université de Montréal
- John Mackereth, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics
- Cemile Marsan, York University
- Stefan Pelletier, Université de Montréal
- Erik Rosolowsky, University of Alberta
- James Sikora, Bishop’s University
- Matthew Taylor, NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics
General Observer programs will take place alongside Director’s Discretionary-Early Release Science (ERS) and Guaranteed Time Observation (GTO) programs. All of these observations begin after the telescope’s commissioning period, which takes at least six months.
The full list of General Observer programs is available at https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-programs/cycle-1-go.
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore will conduct Webb science operations and house Webb’s mission operations center, which commands and controls the telescope. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be the world’s premier space science observatory when it launches in 2021. 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.