- When you think about chemistry,
odds are that your brain
comes up with images
of people in lab coats working in kind of
a sterile laboratory
environment with beakers
and catalysts and compounds,
but how on earth do you actually perform
chemistry experiments when
you're talking about objects
billions of miles away?
Astro chemists don't have
the luxury of being able
to take samples of the
things that they're trying
to analyze.
And you're going to learn
about the really fascinating way
that the chemistry of space
is actually based entirely
on what can be observed.
So, we're going to talk
to one of the scientists
that's working with the James
Webb Space Telescope Program
to find out exactly how
she and others like her
have created chemical
profiles based entirely
on what they can see.
While visiting NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center,
we got scientist, Stefanie Milam
to help us understand
how all of this chemistry
and science of space works
and to get a sense on how
learning about the chemistry
of far distant space
and studying the science
of what we can see far
away can really impact life
right here on Earth.
- My role for JWST is to make sure that we
have this massive, huge
astrophysics observatory
that looks for the farthest
stars in the Universe
and try to point it at the
fastest moving, brightest objects
in the sky, which include the
bodies of the Solar System.
So, instead of going to a
laboratory and using beakers
and microscopes and
studying chemistry in a lab,
I get to use telescopes
or space observatories
to study chemistry in space.
So, I look for different molecules.
I look for signatures of them,
and by studying the different molecules
and their different
abundances and temperatures,
we actually learn about the chemistry
that's happening in space.
So, the tool I use as
opposed to wet chemistry
or high analytical instruments
that most chemists use,
is I use spectroscopy.
So, every molecule has a fingerprint.
Just like you have a
distinguishable fingerprint from me,
so does every molecule.
So, what we do, is we're
studying the fingerprints
of these given molecules
in different environments.
So, once we have the full fingerprint,
we know exactly how much
of that molecule is there,
how hot or cold it is,
whether it's in a solid
phase or a gas phase,
and then we can actually put all together
all the different fingerprints
and sort of build up a chemical network
and see what's actually going on.
But with JWST, we can
do basically everything
in the Solar System from Mars on out.
That's just because of the sun shield.
We can't point towards
the Earth or the moon
or Venus or Mercury,
but everything from near-Earth asteroids
to comets to the ice giants
to the gas giants, their moons.
We can see volcanoes on moons.
We can study atmospheric
effects and the outer planets.
We're even going to get to observe Pluto,
just as New Horizons
just did and its moons.
What I'm hoping to
achieve with this mission
is we can do very detailed
compositional studies
that we can't do from the ground.
And actually, one of the
best objects for JWST
are comets or icy bodies
in the outer Solar System.
We just don't really have
access with any observatory
here on the ground.
Hopefully, we'll be able to
determine what the composition
of these small, icy bodies are.
They're actually the relics of
when our solar system formed,
so they're considered
little pieces of history
that are frozen,
and every once in a while,
they happen to fly close enough to us
that we can observe them from the ground.
But with JWST, we can
actually observe them
in their own environment,
sort of at a very distant, you know,
out beyond Pluto and Neptune.
So, getting the composition
of those will really tell us
what was happening whenever
our solar system formed.
And if we can get the chemistry of that
and see if that chemistry's
ubiquitous across the Universe
and the Galaxy,
that means that we have the
same organic chemistry here,
in our own solar system, as we do
in other solar systems.
- Now you know about the amazing stuff
that you can actually
discover simply by looking
at objects far, far distant from our world
with an object like the
James Webb Space Telescope.
So, if you're interested
in experiments and science
just like this,
you can absolutely follow
us at Now.HowStuffWorks.com
because we're going to
be following the work
of the James Webb Space Telescope
as well as other cool space science.
We hope you join us.
