David Kipping

Cosmologists, star formation astronomers, those of us studying exoplanets, those of us wanting to study the ultra-deep fields and the origin of the first galaxies, the expansion of the universe.

Everyone has to share this resource and

But we could potentially each have one JWST each that is maybe just studying a handful of the brightest exoplanet stars and measuring their atmospheres.

This is important because we talked about this planet TRAPPIST-1e earlier.

that planet, if JWCC stared at it and tried to look for biosignatures, by which I mean oxygen, nitrous oxide, methane, it would take it an order of 200 transits to get even a very marginal 2.5-sigma detection of those, which basically nobody would believe with that

And 100 transits, I mean, this thing transits once every six days, so you're talking about sort of four years of staring at the same star with one telescope.

There'd be some breaks, but it'd be hard to schedule much else because you'll have to continuously catch each one of these transits to build up your signal-to-noise.

And so JWST is never going to do that.

In principle, technically, JWST could technically have the capability of just about detecting a biosignature on an Earth-like planet around a non-sun-like star.

But still, impressively, we have basically the technology to do that, but we simply cannot dedicate all of its time practically to that one resource.

And so Starship opens up opportunities like that of mass-producing

these kinds of telescopes, which will allow us to survey for life in the universe, which of course is one of the grand goals of astronomy.

It's a really difficult process.

I don't envy the TAC that are gonna have to make this decision.

We call it the TAC, the Time Allocation Committee that make this decision.

And I've served on these before and it's very difficult.

I mean, typically for Hubble, we were seeing at least 10, sometimes 20 times the number of proposals for telescope time versus available telescope time.

For JDST, there has been one call already that has gone out.

We call it cycle one.

And that was oversubscribed by, I think something like six to one, seven to one.