fresh light. but the james webb telescope can see this ancient light that began its journey in some cases at the very beginning of the universe we saw this $10 billion space telescope as it was being packed up for launch webb, vastly more powerful than its predecessor hubble, will circle the sun in a yearly orbit a million miles wider than ours. the people who built webb say it could create whole new fields of science. hubble basically discovered black holes and proved their existence. so that led to a whole science there. so it can really just keep propagating reporter: advance the human race mm-hmm. reporter: scientists will use the sheer power of webb to zoom in on planets we could not reach before now, look inside their alien atmospheres and search for life thousands of scientists are lined up for the data. it s a miraculous gift the chance to get out beyond our planet, see itime n
capture light rains from billions of years ago. it s a time machine. it s going to take us back to the very beginnings of the universe. reporter: nasa says the telescope will be able to zoom in on exoplanets in distant galaxies, examine their alien atmospheres, and beam back images across a million miles of space to scientists on earth. after webb s images and discoveries start to come in, the way we look at the sky will be different in the future than the way we look at it today. reporter: it has the potential to change how we see our place in the cosmos. we ve still got six months until the webb telescope is up and running, a million miles from earth, that is if everything goes according to plan. unlike the hubble telescope which astronauts could repair, the webb telescope will be on its own for its mission.
detected this way. they range from smaller than earth size to jupiter size. so eileen showed me this yesterday. look how long it is, too. we re hoping to find and identify the pool of transiting planets in the habitable zones of stars. not too hot and not too cold but just right for life. the goldilocks zone. one system that had two viable planet candidates that were very exciting. yeah. you want to study these candidates with the james webb space telescope. yes. actually, the question often comes up, how much time are we going to get for exoplanets. you know, if we find a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere in the habitable zone of an m star, do you have any idea how much telescope time we ll need to look at that atmosphere? let s kill it. given that our own atmosphere contains thousands of gases, we expect alien atmospheres to also contain thousands of gases. and my job is to figure out how