NASA Planetary Science with the James Webb Space Telescope

Join us for an introduction to the James Webb Space Telescope, presented by Dr. Olivia Wilkins of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on December 25, 2021 after more than a decade of anticipation. The telescope, which is the size of a tennis court, was folded up into an Ariane 5 rocket. After a successful launch, the telescope endeavored to unfold the universe. In its first two years alone, JWST has given us a sharper look of the cosmos and revealed new things about our solar system and beyond, giving us just a taste of what’s to come. This presentation will go over what JWST is and what it aims to study, with a specific focus on the telescope’s first images, which were released in July 2021. Then, it will share some of the exciting advances in solar system science made with JWST. Just under two years since its launch, JWST has already exceeded expectations for remarkable science.

Speaker bio

Dr. Olivia Harper Wilkins, PhD, is a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she conducts cosmic ice experiments to understand how UV radiation affects interstellar, cometary, and planetary ices. Dr. Wilkins earned her PhD in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where she conducted observational astrochemistry research as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow. Before that, she earned a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics from Dickinson College and was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Germany. Dr. Wilkins was named a 2022 CAS (a division of the American Chemical Society) Future Leader and an AGU Science Activation (SciAct) Affiliate. She is passionate about science communication and using art to share science, something that culminated in her writing and illustrating Astrochemistry (2021) for the American Chemical Society’s ACS In Focus series. Dr. Wilkins enjoys traveling with her husband and son and spending time at coffee shops.