Big thank you to Matt Mountain (STSci, AURA) who recently gave a lecture in Oxford on his experience leading the planning and development of JWST and who touched on the Carl Sagan observatory in his talk.

#jwst #alienlife #carlsagan

Hammel et al. (2020; The Carl Sagan Observatory plan) – https://baas.aas.org/pub/2020n7i192/r…
Sagan & Salpeter (1976; ecology in Jupiter’s atmosphere) – https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/p…
Mayor & Queloz (1995; first exoplanet discovered 51 Pegasi b) – https://www.nature.com/articles/378355a0
Carter et al. (2022; JWST first direct image exoplanet HIP 65426b) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.14990.pdf

JWST weekly observing schedules (made public each week) – https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-ex…
JWST raw data archive access (public images available to download free) –

00:00 – Introduction: JWST planning started before Hubble was launched
01:09 – The Carl Sagan Observatory: “Are we alone?”
01:31 – JWST’s design choices and limitations
04:33 – Why “we’re going to need a bigger boat”
05:17 – Simulation of what an exoplanet system would look like to the Sagan Observatory
08:00 – How many exo-Earths the Sagan Observatory is predicted to find
08:47 – The improvement to galaxy evolution studies
09:42 – Launch date is planned for 2034 – why so soon?
11:23 – JWST & the TRAPPIST-1 system while we wait
12:47 – Outro tribute to Carl Sagan
13:22 – Brilliant
14:28 – Bloopers