Merry Christmas from the stars

It was a Christmas gift the world had to wait seven months to open.

Launched on Dec. 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope started to deliver only last week when President Joe Biden shared the first image from the NASA project.

The picture was awesome, the photographic equivalent of time travel. It pulls back the cosmic curtain to show the universe far closer to its purported time of origin.

It’s almost too much to process. Light from 13.7 billion years in the past, entire galaxies, each one brimming with stars, around which could be countless planets, at least some likely containing life, all captured in one image.

But the James Webb wasn’t finished yet.

The next day, NASA revealed images the telescope had captured from Jupiter, including a shot of Europa, one of the gas giant’s many moons.

Jupiter is practically close enough in astronomical terms that we could drop by and borrow a cup of sugar, a piddling 365 million miles away at its closest point and 601 million miles away at its farthest.

When talking about space, numbers become mind-blowing really fast. The James Webb telescope is a million miles from Earth. That’s the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe – our globe, that is – 40 times. A vast distance, but still comprehensible.

What’s completely outside my ability to visualize is how far light has traveled in that first Webb image – 80 billion trillion miles. (Yes, billion trillion.) When I tried to determine how many times around the Earth that was, I’m pretty sure I broke Google’s calculator.

In a week of other news that was mostly terrible, the telescope’s success was the balm the world needed, a tall, cool glass of water on a scorching day.

To paraphrase “Casablanca,” the problems of three people – or, in this case, seven billion – don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy universe. There is so much more out there, infinitely more, which helps put our own challenges into perspective. If we can succeed with something as complex as the James Webb telescope, then surely we can yadda-yadda-yadda, insert transitory or intractable problems of the day/week/month that need solving.

That’s not meant to sound dismissive. But it is a gigantic reset switch of sorts, a reminder that our own obstacles pale in the face of a limitless universe and are solvable when people work cooperatively and not competitively.

An article on space.com details the years of engineering and testing that went into the telescope’s creation, along with the many challenges of deployment, including a mirror that “collapses like origami for the launch” and then later unfolds in space, and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. More than 300 “single-point-of-failure” glitches could have ended the mission.

Yet it’s up there, orbiting the sun, transmitting images of incredible clarity, helping scientists learn more about our own solar system and the universe itself.

At $10 billion, some may quibble with the price tag. However, by my math, it cost only 73 cents for each year we peeled back like an onion to peer into the past. That’s less than most readers paid for today’s newspaper.

It’s also a bargain for a Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.