Arizona Illustrated
Making of the James Webb Space Telescope, Herbarium, and Car
Season 2022 Episode 805 | 28mVideo has Closed Captions
Making of the James Webb Space Telescope, Herbarium, and Carlos
This Week on Arizona Illustrated… Exploring the Making of the James Webb Telescope, the most ambitious telescope ever made, the Herbarium, home to nearly half a million dried plant specimens, and mosaic tile muralist Carlos Valenzuela symbols of community.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Arizona Illustrated
Making of the James Webb Space Telescope, Herbarium, and Car
Season 2022 Episode 805 | 28mVideo has Closed Captions
This Week on Arizona Illustrated… Exploring the Making of the James Webb Telescope, the most ambitious telescope ever made, the Herbarium, home to nearly half a million dried plant specimens, and mosaic tile muralist Carlos Valenzuela symbols of community.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship[Tom] This week on Arizona Illustrated the making of the James Webb Space Telescope.
[George] The Webb telescope goes in space so it can be cool.
So it's going to be a cold infrared telescope [Tom] The herbarium the herbarium are incredibly vital for documenting and understanding biodiversity [Tom] And mosaic tile muralist Carlos [Carlos] Murals are a real important narrative.
All these murals were created, a community effort that created by young people that were a lot of times a very difficult situation.
Welcome to Arizona Illustrated, I'm Tom McNamara.
We're here outside the Stewart Observatory, home to the University of Arizona's Department of Astronomy.
You know, when the observatory was dedicated back in nineteen twenty three, it housed one thirty six inch diameter Newtonian telescope.
And the first view was a beautiful crescent of the planet.
Venus Well the department come a long way since then.
Working with NASA, scientists here have helped to design the most ambitious telescope ever.
The James Webb Space Telescope successor to the Hubble Space telescope.
This December, the JWST, as it's called, will launch into orbit more than a million miles from Earth Revealing images of galaxies crisper and deeper than ever before.
[George] So the James Webb telescope is an end of a series of infrared telescopes in space It's much bigger than we've ever launched before into space.
In fact, it's bigger and more sophisticated than any telescope, much less an infrared telescope [Marcia] Really, what makes it special is that it's opening up a new wavelength regime.
And so it's going to show us quite a new view of the infrared universe.
One of our key goals is to find the first galaxies.
So we'll be able to trace things a lot further back to the big bang than we have before.
I'm Marcia Rieke and I'm the team leader of one of the four instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope, and I'm George Rieke, and I'm the co-lead on the second of the four instruments on James Webb.
[Announcer] T minus six, five, four, three, two, one and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe.
[Marcia] In the 1980s, there was a program that NASA ran, called the Great Observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope was part of that program, as was the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Each one looking at a different wavelength regime and taking each one, taking advantage of being above the atmosphere, which is why we put telescopes in space.
And as discoveries piled up, it became clear that one needed to have an infrared telescope that could see finer detail, could see detail at the level of the Hubble space telescope.
But at the longer wavelengths.
And so that led to the development of the James Webb Space Telescope.
[George] Infrared astronomy is basically centered on wavelengths that are longer than visible light.
It's basically heat rays.
And so trying to observe from the ground is actually a losing proposition.
We try it all the time.
But the telescopes warm.
So you have to fight against all the energy that's being poured out by the telescope.
So the Webb telescope goes in space so it can be cool.
So it's going to be a cold.
And for a telescope without those big backgrounds that we have on the ground, and it's going to allow us to see very fine details because its mirrors so big.
So that's why it's so exciting.
[Marcia] As discovered back in the 1920s, the universe is expanding.
We've known for a long time that there's something called the Doppler shift, so that if something's moving away from you, the wavelengths get stretched out.
If it's moving towards you, they get compressed.
Stretched out means are getting longer and redder.
Compressed means bluer.
So if we want to look at the most distant galaxies, which would be the first ones to form after the big bang, we have to account for this expansion.
Shifting all the wavelengths in, you get to the point where the only wavelengths that are left are ones you can observe in the infrared.
So I came to the University of Arizona as a postdoc actually hired by George, and I came here because I knew that this was where things were happening and where infrared was really going to grow [George] University of Arizona is actually where infrared astronomy got started.
Basically, it was founded over in the lunar and planetary lab.
And ever since then, the University of Arizona has led the way in infrared astronomy.
We've been very involved in the very first infrared space telescope.
And now of course, we're central and provide the instruments for the James Webb telescope.
[George] Part of it is that any field of science is very intense and you have to be very focused on what you're doing if you're going to be at the state of the art in the field of science.
And so you can't really talk to anyone other than another astronomer because nobody else will understand.
[Marcia] Well, he hired me and we had to spend a lot of time together, and over time it became clear that we were not just interested in the in the professional work, but that we had other interests in common.
And one thing led to another, and eventually we got married.
[George] So working so closely together has the advantage that it's almost like a single brain thinking about how to do something.
And it was possible to kind of intuitively understand what would be a better design and a worse design.
[Marcia] My role in the JWST project is as the principal investigator for the near infrared camera NIRCam NIRCam was envisioned as part of the original instrument suite for the Webb Telescope.
And when NASA put out what's called an announcement of opportunity to propose.
George started thinking about, well, you know, we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket.
Maybe we ought to propose for a piece of the million for an instrument action.
And never did we think that we would both get selected.
But of course, that was history.
My instrument is the mid infrared instrument commonly called MIRI, and it's the instrument that lets us look inside interstellar clouds of dust where the very first stars are forming or just started to warm up.
Well, near Kim and Myrie complement each other because they work at two different wavelength ranges And so if you want to do some imaging, you would need to use both instruments together.
We got selected to work on the instruments in 2002, and it wasn't until about 2007, 2008 that the designs were all agreed to and people actually started building stuff And what's going on now in August of twenty twenty one is doing the final bits of assembly in getting ready to pack it up to ship to Kourou, which is where the telescope will be attached to the rocket.
[George] After launch, the next big item of suspense is unfolding, the solar panels and their batteries that last for a limited amount of time to power getting them out.
The telescope is so big that there was no rocket fairin and it could fit inside.
So everything has to be folded up.
And so there are many, many different parts that have to be articulated and extended and stretched and so on.
There will be a extended period of tension because any one of those things not working would be a very big problem.
And she's got a line at all up [Marcia] Right about 35 days after launch, NIRCam will get turned on.
Each of the 18 segments of the primary mirror will make an image of, of whatever star we're pointing towards.
And then as the telescope finishes getting cold, the other instruments will get turned on.
Then we'll move into what's called regular science operations, where we'll start taking data and there'll be big excitement when you see that your instrument works.
And then there'll be big excitement when you finally start getting the data for your project.
[Marcia] So you promised this wine is going to be really good.
[George] Yeah.
[Marcia] Ok, as long as you promise [George] So what are we going to do when we get our data?
[Marcia] See what it means and write papers.
You're going to find the first glimpses, right?
[Marcia] I hope so.
[George] I think the biggest discovery that Webbs going to make is something I can't tell you.
And the reason is the big discoveries are always things you don't anticipate.
So it's very, very likely with this big breakthrough and what we can see and how much detail we can see and how far away we can see that astronomers, not not me, but somebody will find something just totally mind boggling.
And that's pretty much the history of astronomy.
To get into space, you have to pay a big price in terms of your career and your whole basically your whole life.
The rewards are worth it, but it is a big price.
So the commit yourself completely to doing what you're doing, and that allows you to do it at your very best, and if you're in a marriage with somebody else is completely committed, then there is a resonance.
That lets the two of you have a really big impact.
[Marcia] Sign up for the long haul because you never know how much more time it's going to take, and that's a variant of being committed, but it's the same basic idea.
To follow the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Go to as.arizona.edu For over a century, the University of Arizona has been collecting plant specimens used for scientific study.
We take you inside the herbarium for a look at just a few of the nearly half a million dried plants on site.
(soft chiming music) [Shelley] A herbarium is a natural history museum.
We have collections of preserved plant specimens.
My name is Shelley McMahon, I am the Faculty Director of the University of Arizona Herbarium.
This herbarium was started before the university opened.
They hired a botanist, not a faculty member arrived, and he didn't have any material to use to teach the students.
So he basically drove around the area, getting to know the flora and making specimens, and preserving them.
It's the second oldest building It was built in 1903.
It was originally built as the gym.
(birds chirping) So people have been documenting the diversity around them for millennia, really.
People wanted to understand what plants were edible, what plants were medicinal.
In Europe, you can go to some of the really old, famous herbaria and see specimen are hundreds of years old.
The idea of documenting diversity through preserving actual specimens has been around for a long time.
(storage lock opening) Okay, so this is what a fully prepared herbarium specimen looks like.
We have a label which gives us information on what the species is.
It has a date when it was collected.
This is a museum piece and so each museum piece gets an accession number.
This number 439,329, so we have a lot of specimens in here.
We also have a little packet on each sheet and that allows us to store any bits and pieces that might fall off.
Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist in the 1700s who looked at the way people were naming things.
In his time, there wasn't a system, so he developed the system that's just two words, a genus and a species.
The first one is the genus so that tells you what people think it's closely related to.
'Cause members of a genus are all cousins, if you will.
And then the species is that one biological entity that's separate from the others.
Brittlebush is Encelia farinosa so it's in the Encelia genus.
And it actually, if you travel around and you see other Encelias you'll know that, oh yeah, that's related to our brittlebush.
Whereas if you just call the brittlebush, you wouldn't know anything about what it's related to.
[George] Hi, I am George Ferguson.
I'm the Collections Manager here at the University of Arizona Herbarium.
We're gonna demonstrate how the first steps in melting the plant after it's been collected.
[Shelley] The glue's a special glue, it's an archival glue.
We actually get it from bookbinders.
It will preserve the specimen for, how we anticipate, hundreds of years.
We also have special paper.
It's non-acidic archival paper.
Also, a label has been printed with all of the really important information, there.
And so one mounter will make a pile of alternating absorbent paper, specimen and coated wax paper, taped up wax paper, and put the bricks on top when they're done for the day, and then the next day we can come out and unpack it all.
So natural history collections of which the herbarium is one are incredibly vital for documenting and understanding biodiversity.
Each object, it represents information that can be useful for so many different questions, and that's exciting to me, but each one of those has a story.
Just the fact that it's here, somebody had to be traveling on horseback through the mountains of the Sierra Madre in order to find that particular thing, preserve it in a way that was gonna make sure it didn't rot, and it got all the way back to some museum.
And the huge amount of effort it took, and still takes, to generate that kind of primary biological information is, it's inspiring to me.
So I think these objects that are in here are really precious.
(soft chiming music) [Tom] The herbarium is open to the public by appointment to schedule the time, go to their website at cals.arizona.edu/herbarium For Carlos Valenzuela.
Art is a family tradition and a lifelong obsession.
At a young age, he learned from his mother.
If you can make it with your hands and endowed with enough love, you can feed your children.
That's what Carlos has been doing for most of his life.
The community educator and mosaic tile muralist has helped to facilitate the creation of hundreds of murals across southern Arizona, symbols of the community and a labor of love.
[Carlos] This is a technique that my teacher Linda, Linda Hayworth, taught me.
When you begin it's daunting, right?
'Cause you have to put all these little pieces, one by one, with a pair of tweezers.
But once you get into it, it just kind of takes on, its own rhythm.
These patterns start for me and it shows you what it wants you to do.
My name is Carlos Valenzuela.
I've been designing, painting, fabricating murals out of glass and tile, since I was about 17 years old.
I never went to art school.
My artistic training came through apprenticing with the community [Racheal] I liked Carlos instantly because he looked like a homie.
He visually looked like a classic cholo, but he was extremely soft-spoken He wasn't machismo at all.
Carlos and I worked together for a year.
It was the first time that I had interacted with somebody.
He was like a professional artist.
30 years later, I'm at the public library.
It's an open call for murals This person starts talking.
And I'm like, hmm.
And I look up and it's Carlos.
[Carlos] I didn't know who she was when I first saw her at the meeting and she says, "Hey, you had a big effect on me as an artist, a positive effect on me as an artist", which was kind of flattering.
But it's like, in what way?
[Racheal] A couple of days later he reached out and said, "Do you want to maybe collaborate?"
And I was like, oh my gosh.
[Carlos] We got this wall, which has an odd shape.
There's a lot of beautiful murals downtown.
For Racheal and myself, murals are real important for narrative.
It was important to use this opportunity to say something.
It addresses the incarceration of kids and the people dying, crossing the desert.
(mellow music) [Racheal] When we were working on this piece and people would come by and they'd ask oh, I'm a mural whatever, and I have this little website and I like to tag murals and this and that.
And we'd be like, well, have you been.
I would be like, sorry, I'd say you got to go south of 22nd.
You got to go to the Pascue.
Like, you have to see.
And it was like, what?
[Carlos] Here is one from 2003.
The mural we did on South Fourth Avenue, and one of our students, one of the teachers at Las Artes.
I've tried to document as much of it and print it so that I can take it places with me.
And now everybody presents on their little iPad, but I still carry this book arou [Racheal] I think Carlos is one of, if not the most, prolific artists in town, as far as making public pieces of art.
[Carlos] There's a vast amount of mosaic murals in south Tucson And this is the tattoo mural.
Everybody loves a tattoo mural.
This is when the kids were making it.
It stems from the Las Artes program, which was a county program that was started in the early nineties.
It was a GED program.
This is after two weeks of training and they're making this kind of quality work.
We developed a technique so that that could happen.
All these murals were created through community effort.
They were created by young people that were, a lot of times, in very difficult situations.
[Maribel] When I first came to Tucson, I had already heard about Las Artes.
If you were anywhere near the field of arts and youth development, nationally, you knew that there was a really exciting program happening in Tucson that was turning heads It was training youth who were having problem in school, creating an incredible amount of that was dynamic, powerful, visually stunning.
I met Carlos there for the first time.
And then later on, I followed his work at the Pascua Yaqui tribe.
- Connie decorate that one all t On the Pascua Yaqui reservation probably has the largest collect of handmade glass and ceramic art probably in the entire Southwest And nobody knows.
Each panel is a story that addresses a historical part of the community.
The young people in this community have a respect for art and artists that I haven't seen anywhere else.
And because of that, they took what they were doing very seriously.
And you can see just in the craftsmanship of everything that's done here, that they put that kind of effort and heart into it.
One of the murals here that's one of my favorites and it's very dear to me is the one of the Deer Dancer.
We had a photo shoot specifically with one of my students, Francisco Baltizar Peros.
Peros is a very well-known deer dancer in the community.
You know, in the old days, he would have been a holy man in his tribe.
He's got a pretty serious illness.
You can't dance anymore because the illness cost for him to not be able to walk anymore.
Had to deal with a lot of issues in his life.
He must've been sent so that I could meet with him and work with him.
My work here with the Pascua Yaqui tribe, this community has been life-changing for me to say the least.
I found that in the production of this work, that they began to talk to each about what's going on in their life.
And as they're resolving these things on the table, these things up here were also getting resolved.
I was very emotionally attached to that process.
And there was a lot of healing, even for myself, I won't go into great detail, but childhood wasn't the easiest Central city and south central, it was a rough place to grow up.
My mother was a seamstress among other things.
[Amelia] I brought my three kids up by myself.
And I thought, well, we need a little bit more in order for them to go to school.
[Carlos] These are some dolls that my mom made and there's my daughter, Julie.
It's really symbolic of literally growing up around art.
[Amelia] I used to work during the day, come home at night and sew.
[Carlos] I learned from her that if you could make something with your hands and endow it with enough love that you could feed your children.
And that's kind of what I've been doing.
[Amelia] And I'm real proud of him because he would work, come home and do this artwork to all hours of the night.
And then he would take me to see what he made and it made me feel so good, you know?
I said, "Wow".
- It's had an effect on my children, as well.
This is my son, Carlitos.
As soon as they could walk, I started taking them to rock concerts (laughing) and they saw the Misfits one time.
And that was the result of that concert.
He's in London studying.
He's working on his master's degree in architecture and urban renewal.
So it's become a family tradition.
There's a tremendous amount of joy that comes from it.
I'm very lucky, very blessed.
[Maribel] It was a dream of mine to be someone who could commission a mural for my home.
It was like, I never thought that would be possible.
And I wanted Carlos to do it.
Carlos is very special because he embodies the spirit of community generosity.
[Racheal] Almost like a Shakespearian, sort of like, tortured thing happening.
You know, it's a different kind of experience.
And I think that that ties so much in to him as a person, and his upbringing and his culture.
[Maribel] He could be the best, prolific, most talented guy.
And if he didn't have that heart it wouldn't matter the same way.
It matters because every little piece of tile that you see there, represented a giving, something he was digging deep in from love, from understanding, from respect, and sort of putting it on that material.
Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.
"To the Stars" is a film that I made that was commissioned by SFMOMA.
It's a film and a laser light installation.
It's a kind of mosaic that's a portrait of many people like Alonzo King's Lines valet, who does this incredible speaker that also can express amazingly through the language of dance.
I'm Tom McNamara.
We'll see you next week.
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