And so, hi everyone. There's a question, is everyone viewing automatically or do we need to each mute yourselves? Everyone viewing is automatically muted. So, thank you Dustin Edgeman for answering, for asking that question. Excellent question. So, now I just wanna say I'm excited for everyone here to join us on our first big webinar, a video presentation for the Night Sky Network. We have a great guest tonight, Dr. Stephanie Maum with the James Webb Space Telescope. She's the Deputy Project Scientist. Hi there. And, while we're getting flooded with rain, she's about to get hit by a bunch of snow from the same storm system out in Maryland. So, good luck. Before we get started, I just wanna make sure we can all get set and view everything. In case you're unable to view our slides and you should be able to, we're gonna do a screen sharing in a minute. You can download the slides at bit.ly slash nsnjamesweb. That's with two B's at the end. And I'm gonna put that in our chat right now. There we go. And yeah, so we're gonna have our Q&A at the end of the talk. And to do the Q&A there's a couple ways you can ask us questions via the text box and also there's another feature in Zoom where you can raise your hand. And these are all features visible in the upper left-hand corner of your screen. I think that's true. As the hosts and the panelists, you see slightly different stuff than the people online watching. So yeah. So there's two separate things too. There's a chat box to just chat with each other and casually chat. Then there's a Q&A box where it actually lists your questions and keeps track. Cool. So just before we talk, I just have a brief minute to talk about some nice guy network news. This is really our first webinar in this new format. And so that's the biggest news for the week. The other thing is that we're gonna have a week, the other thing is I'm just about our Outreach Award pins. There's a bit of confusion on the announcement. So our deadline for logging the events this year was January 12th with the deadline to actually order the pins for your club and for your outreach volunteers. That's actually still 10 days from now at the end of January. So there's still time to order additional pins if you need them. But every club that's logged events gets three free pins. And those pins, in part, some of the funding for the pins and for the Knights Guy Network in the past year is from the NASA Insight Mission. And we had the pins made before they had to scrub their launch for this year. And if you've seen the Martian or followed Martian exploration at all, getting to Mars is hard. And if you get there, you wanna make sure your instruments are all working. And with their seismometer not working, that was basically half the mission. So they're putting it off and hopefully they can get another launch window in the next couple of years, which will be at least a minimum of two years to get back to Mars. So that's how the Martian launch window works. You get every couple of years, you get 10 to 20 days-ish to get there. So that's hard physics, unfortunately. Okay. And so with that, it's my great pleasure to introduce our speaker for the evening, Dr. Stephanie Merlam in her upcoming work on the James Webb Space Telescope's Planetary Science Observing Program. Dr. Merlam was worked at the Astrochemistry Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. And in March of 2012, she was selected as the James Webb Space Telescope's Planetary Science Liaison. Then under this role, she helped establish the Next Generation Space Telescope as a planetary science resource and has engaged the community in future observations and preparations and assisted the project to ensure that the capabilities of the observatory were actually suitable for solar system observations. And in July 2014, Dr. Merlam was appointed as the, I'll just say JWSTs, Deputy Project Scientist for Planetary Science and she will continue her role through the undoubtedly successful launch in 2018. And I'm going to turn it over to the good doctor. Stephanie, would you like to begin? Certainly, and thank you for the introduction. As he said, my name's Stephanie Merlam. I am the Deputy Project Scientist on James Webb Space Telescope. Since I've been working on this project, a lot of advancements have come to making this super sensitive telescope that's supposed to see the first stars of the universe to actually capable of observing planets in our own solar system, which happened to be some of the brightest objects at these wavelengths. So I have a presentation for you. I also have a series of links for more information on where you can find some things. I'm going to show you and discuss with you what the observatory actually is. Some of the potential science that we've come up with for solar system science and then give you a status update. And then at the end, during your questions, which hopefully everybody at the society will help me manage questions, I'll show you the video of the actual launch and deployment sequence and you'll get to see how the telescope actually unfolds. You're also welcome to contact me. My email is Stephanie.n.mylam at nasa.gov. I'll give that to you at the end as well. If you have any further questions or if you want copies of any of my slides or of the presentation, I'm happy to give that to you. So with that, I will start my presentation. I'm not going to be monitoring the chat or anything. So hopefully someone will come on and speak to me I need to see something or do something. Oh yeah, we got you covered here. Okay, so this presentation, just in case you're on Twitter, hashtag JWST is our tweet. And you can also follow us at nasa web telescope where telescope is sort of hacked apart. And you're welcome to tweet about this presentation as we go or on anything latest and greatest that you may see. So what is the James Webb Space Telescope? Well, it's a multi-agency initiative. This is the next generation space telescope that was directed by NASA to follow up the Hubble Space Telescope. As you know, Hubble is no longer going to be serviced. We don't have a space shuttle to service it. It just had its 25th year anniversary and it's time to move on to newer and more advanced technology than this ancient, this relic of a telescope, even though Hubble is doing fantastic science and we hope that it lasts for another 10 years. There's a lot of things that we can do that are complimentary from Hubble and James Webb. So especially here at NASA, we're really hoping the mission lasts a lot longer. But JWST or the James Webb Space Telescope, you'll hear me call it JWST throughout the presentation, is a joint effort through NASA, ESA, which is a European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. It's being led here at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Its main contractor is Northwick Grumman and it has four science instruments which have been distributed across the agencies. There's a Nuren Fred camera or Nurecam that's built at the University of Arizona. There's the Nuren Fred Spectrograph or NureSpec, which is built by the European Space Agency. Nuren Fred is in the United States in Baltimore, Maryland. This is the same place that has done the operations for Hubble Space Telescope. It's fully deployable infrared telescope, so it's not an optical telescope, but Hubble is in Fred with a six and a half meter diameter primary. It's a segmented mirror to get it that large, also to help with weight. It's operations are at cryogenic temperatures, but it's not actually a cooled mirror. It's passively cooled just by sitting in the shade from the sun and space. It will orbit at L2 or the second Lagrange point from Earth. We plan to launch in October of 2018, somewhere around Halloween. So start coming up with your best JWST Halloween costume that you possibly can. We have a five year science mission but we think we'll be able to operate for over 10 years. Our limit for our mission is not cryogenics, it is actually fuel. We have to use our gas to actually maintain the orbit and I'll get to that in a little bit. JWST was built and designed to address four main science themes. First and foremost is the end of the dark ages, the first light and the ionizations. So this is looking for the first stars in the universe. The assembly of galaxies, the birth of stars and protoplanetary systems. And last but certainly not least, planetary systems and the origin of life. This actually includes the solar system. So who is James Webb and why did we name this observatory after him? James Webb was a second administrator of NASA. He was administrator from 1961 to 1968. He oversaw the first manned spaceflight program, which was the Mercury mission program. As well as the second program on Gemini, mariner and pioneer planetary exploration programs. And he also oversaw Apollo. He was a big advocate for science, especially astrophysics and planetary science and research. This is sort of what led to the huge science research initiative with NASA, as well as technology and spaceflight. So as I said, we have this huge deployable telescope. This just sort of gives you a speck of what it looks like. So you have a large primary telescope. So this is a six and a half meter segmented mirror. There's actually 18 segments that are all gold plated. The mirrors are made of beryllium. Actually, it's almost like a bored out beryllium, which makes them really, really light. Being six and a half meters in diameter, that's quite a bit of mass, but being bored out, it actually reduces the mass quite significantly. It's also very stable under different thermal conditions. So depending on if the mirror is hot or cold, we don't see a lot of change in the structure or the size of the telescope. All the light that hits the primary is directed into a secondary mirror, which then focuses it down into the instrument science module, which actually sits right behind the primary mirror. You can't really see it in this picture very well, but there's other views later that you'll actually see it. All the science and instruments are on the cold side of the telescope or on the top side of the sun shield. We do have a multi-layer sun shield. It's five layers.  It's about the size of a regulation tennis court. It's very, very big. We have a spacecraft bus, which contains most of our steering controls, all the machineries, the computers, the reaction wheels. We have an antenna also that's attached to the spacecraft bus on the sun side. This is where we send and receive data from the Deep Space Network. We have star trackers, which help us point our telescope and tell us where we are in our sky. And we have one solar power array. It's quite small considering, but it's always in the sun. We're never in the shadow of the Earth or the Moon since we're in orbit at the second Lagrange point. So we actually get quite a bit of efficiency through this small solar power array. So compared to Hubble, James Webb is pretty big. It's almost three times the size and diameter of the Hubble Space Telescope Mirror. Even though it's almost three times as big, the whole mirror itself is only about half the weight of the Hubble Space Telescope Mirror. This is the advantage for using beryllium and boring it out in the back. So even though we have an absolutely massive telescope in space, it's actually quite light with respect to Hubble. This also went in account when we were doing the full design of the spacecraft. For reference, I also have Spitzer over here where it's 0.85 meter diameter mirror. Spitzer is significant because it actually covers more of the wave or the electromagnetic spectrum that James Webb covers, which we can see here. At the bottom of this chart, chart six for those of you who aren't following my screen, you see the electromagnetic spectrum.  Hubble operated from the UV into the near infrared, where one micron sort of is that limit of the near infrared. So you can see HST. You can see JWST actually hits the very edge of the optical spectrum and goes all the way into the mid infrared, which was where Spitzer was optimized at. The vertical part of this graph actually shows you the light collecting area. So being such a large telescope, we actually collect a lot more light, which makes us a lot more sensitive. We cover angular resolutions on the sky that are much better than Hubble or comparable as you get to the far infrared or the mid infrared, excuse me, and significantly better than Spitzer. So JWST is optimized in the near infrared and we can get up to 0.06 arc seconds of angular resolution on the sky, where Hubble was getting about 0.14 arc seconds. So the sun shield. So we have this five layer sun shield. It's made of this capton-like material. It's actually a technology that hasn't even been released yet, but it's amazing. It's almost like tin foil. It's very, very light and thin, but it's actually quite durable. Each of the layers are actually separated by an air gap. That air gap actually helps us cool the telescope even more. It gives us sort of a thermal insulation in between each layer. So on the hot side or in the sunward side on the bottom of the observatory, we're actually reaching about almost 360 degrees Kelvin or 85 degrees Celsius. Whereas on the dark side, we're passively cool just by staying in the shade and the telescope actually will be operating at temperatures around 40 Kelvin or minus 233 degrees Celsius. For Fahrenheit, those numbers are also on this slide just for reference. So how do you launch a tennis court-sized sun shield and a six and a half meter primary telescope into space? We don't have rockets with payloads that big, so we have to fold it all up. This is where we actually get the term of the origami telescope. So on the right of slide chart eight, you'll see the actual configuration, the folded configuration for launch. This is going to be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket out of French Guiana. The rocket was actually provided by the European Space Agency. It's a very successful rocket and we anticipate a very successful launch with this rocket. So the telescopes folded up and stowed and launched and deployed out to the second Lagrange point, which is 930,000 miles from Earth. The second Lagrange point is one of the five stable Lagrange points that we have around Earth. You can see them on the lower right hand side of the slide. Hubble was an Earth orbiting space telescope. This is why it was in a can. So the sun shield was actually always towards the sun and the observatory could rotate and go around and always keep the sun away. JWST doesn't have that option. So we have to keep it somewhere where we can sort of stay in the shade at all times. So to do this, we're actually limited in what our field of regard is on the sky. So we basically get to see a donut in the sky at any given time. This is because when you look at how JWST actually has to operate, sunward side has to always be on the bottom side of the observatory. So we can't actually tilt the telescope with respect to the sun shade. So you get this sort of angle arc that we can actually observe at any given time, which makes doing nighttime or midnight observations complimentary to the ground quite the challenge. But we do see the full sky at least twice a year. So for solar system observations, this can be quite a challenge as well. But basically what we'll do is we'll do most of our bodies in the solar system when they're near quadrature are sort of at their further point from the sun and the Earth. So here's a summary of JWST and its vitals. So we have this general observatory. As I said, it has four major science theme which cover all of astronomy and astrophysics. We have a five years requirement for operations. But as I said, we anticipate 10 years or longer. The primary mirror is six and a half meters. That's 21.3 feet for those of you who prefer using the metric system versus the English system. It's an 18 segmented mirror, five layer sun shield about the size of a tennis court. We are in orbit at L2, not stationary at L2 but actually orbiting L2. So we're not in the shadow of the Earth. We operate below 50 Kelvin. As I said, we're passively cooled. We anticipate the observatory's primary mirror to be around 40 Kelvin. Between the four science instruments, we cover wavelengths from 0.6 to 28 and a half microns. This and the instruments actually allow us to have multiple types of imaging and spectroscopy including filtered imaging, slit, integral field and grisly spectroscopy, coronography, which will be ideal for doing exoplanet studies and aperture mask interferometry. The heart and soul of this massive observatory isn't the primary mirror or the sun shield. It's actually the science instruments. So I just told you that we operate from 0.6 to 28 and a half microns. That's through all four science instruments. Our near infrared instruments are optimized to operate between 0.6 and about five microns. Then the technology change actually converts us to going to the mid infrared instrument where we cover the rest of the spectrum. You can see that all of them offer either spectroscopy, imaging or both. And we have quite a limited field of view but it's still quite good being a couple of arc minutes in general. This is an extremely sensitive telescope. Being so large, being state of the art, we have the best detectors that you can get now. We are designed to detect the faintest objects in the sky. The comparison that John Mather, our principal scientist on the mission actually has this statement where you can actually detect a bumblebee at the distance of a moon. So these are nanogenic type of detection limits. But as I said, I wanna look at the brightest objects in the sky. These are the solar system objects. Mars is the brightest thing you can look at in the near infrared in the sky and the mid infrared actually. So what we did was we were able to implement short exposures by using subarray modes, high resolution spectroscopy, fast reading detectors. And basically we were able to come up with techniques and observing strategies where we could actually look at these really bright targets. The other thing is solar system bodies actually happen to move quite fast. So we had to make sure that we have this big floppy telescope tennis courts with a giant sail basically that we could actually track something moving across the sky at pretty high rates of motion. Those rates of motions were actually defined by Mars. Mars is an extremely fast moving object in our solar system. It moves at rates up to 30 milli arc seconds per second. So just for sort of a comparison, the average velocity of Mars, if you wanted to calculate it out for the 30 milli arc second per second rate is about 53,691 miles per hour. For reference Pluto is about a factor of five slower. So the telescope can actually track things that are moving pretty fast across the sky, which is ideal. However, we can't see the fastest moving near earth objects or comets as they're flowing right by, but we can observe them most of the time, which is really great. We also have an ideal angular resolution for looking at the solar system bodies. This is just a chart giving you a perspective of how big these objects are in the sky. Even though we know Jupiter and Saturn are extremely big, you also have to take in account how far away they are from us. So their angular size is here in the first column, showing you the size in arc seconds. The next column is in kilometers. And then you have our instruments on JWST, where you can actually see how many resolution elements we can actually get for each object on the sky. So we get a number of pixels, so we can actually do some really fine sampling of these bodies. Unfortunately, for Pluto, we're not gonna have the resolution that New Horizons had, but we actually have a lot better spectroscopy that we can do so we can get better characterization of these outer solar system bodies, just by knowing what's actually there, as opposed to general ice and rock features. So what I've been working on over the last few years is sort of coming up with a unique set of science cases to motivate planetary scientists to use this general observatory. Traditionally, planetary scientists have looked at these large astrophysics missions reluctantly and hesitantly and haven't been as keen on trying to use them for their own science. At NASA, especially, we're very picky and we want our own mission to our own body. For example, Mars or Saturn, Titan, Europa, et cetera. But we also need to use observatories to support those missions as well. And JWST has a unique set of capabilities that actually enable a lot of science that we can't do from the ground, or with orbiting, landing, or fly by missions. So I reached out to the community and I solicited people to actually help me work on this since I don't particularly study Mars and I don't particularly study Uranus, for example. I needed the experts in our community to actually help us. So a series of papers have just come out. They were published January 4th in the PASP. It's a special edition and it's innovative science, innovative planetary science for the James Webb Space Telescope. So this is all the papers and this is links to their preliminary acceptance versions available on Archive to anybody in the world. If you want the actual publications from PASP, I provide a link to that as well later. So you can actually get the full published version of the articles. So what I'm gonna do is just step you through some of these so you can actually see some of the science cases that these groups of people came up with for their giving solar system target, or targets. So the first paper or article was mine and basically gives you an overview of the mission and operations and highlights some key things, including things like the overall science drivers. So we cover a lot of molecular lines that we can't detect from the ground. One of the most important ones for us in astrobiology or solar system science is CO2. We absolutely have a very hard time observing carbon dioxide at high resolution, especially for small bodies in the outer solar system from the ground. We also cover things like water, deuterated water so we can get the D to H ratio, as well as methane and other features that aren't as easily observed from the ground. Will it be able to obtain spectral colors so we can determine the composition of small bodies for every known hyperbelt object that we know today, which is a unique capability? These bodies can be quite small and very challenging to observe with even some of the larger ground-based observatories. We'll be able to do semi-annual monitoring of planetary weather and seasonal changes, impact events, so when a comet flies into Jupiter, we'll be able to actually observe that and monitor it with time. We'll be able to do near-simultaneous mapping and spectroscopy of comets so we can see how the gas and the dust actually vary within a given comet as well as from comet to comet. One of the key things for JWST, especially for planetary science, is it covers a window of operations that we don't have any sort of full resource observatory that operates at these wavelengths available to the community. This is because New Horizons is gonna end and our next mission to Jupiter actually doesn't even begin science operations until 2030. So JWST is actually a prime observatory for us to use in the community to do our science to maintain a longevity, a current routine monitoring, just so we know the variations that happen temporarily. Unfortunately, Cassini is going to end in 2017. It's gonna be landed on Saturn ever so gently, I'm sure, to never operate again, but we've had some great science from it, but JWST actually has a lot of complementary work, as well as filling that gap before the next Jupiter mission for Saturn and Cassini mission.  These are the bodies that are most likely to have impacted Earth, brought us organics or other primitive materials that could have been the initiators of life or prebiotic chemistry. So knowing what they're actually made of is something that we can do with JWST because they're typically pretty small and they're very hard to detect from the ground, which is why it's such a challenge to do this for planetary protection purposes. But knowing what we can know about them is always ideal, so we'll be able to actually observe these bodies and determine what they're made of. This goes for asteroids as well. Sorry, the last slide was asteroids. Asteroids and Near-Earth objects both have the same or comparable compositions. As I said, these guys tend to move really, really fast from the sky. They move a lot higher or faster than our rates of motion that we're currently set at. So once we're in orbit, we'll be able to test our actual rates of motion and hopefully we can detect things up to about 60 milli arc seconds per second, which opened up that window of number of targets that we could actually look at and observe. Otherwise, we have to wait until they sort of move into a further distance away from Earth or the Sun where they look like they slow down to us. Comets are another small body in our solar system that are really, really interesting and they come really close to Earth. We think that some of the Earth's oceans actually derive from comets since they're the primary carriers of water in our solar system. So we'll actually be able to monitor how much water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide there is in each comet as they come around the Sun. This is really interesting for us because that number varies. The ratio between those three species actually varies quite significantly from comet to comet. So actually constraining what comets are made of and if they actually were the providers of water to Earth during the late heavy bombardment would be significant to know. So just as a comparison, I made this spectrum for reference where you can see the dark green line is the spectrum that was obtained from deep impact. So this was a mission that actually flew to a comet and took a spectrum that covers the JWST wavelength range. However, it was very poor spectral resolution. As you can see, it just is kind of a blob of a line whereas JWST has resolution where we can actually separate those blobs from individual fingerprints of different molecules. So we can actually tell you how much methanol or how much deuterated water or how much carbon dioxide there is. And we can actually extrapolate those numbers with much higher precision and clarity. Mars was a huge surprise for us with JWST. As I've been telling you since the beginning of this presentation, it's one of the brightest objects. We really didn't think we had a chance to actually observe Mars just because it is so bright. But we were able to come up with some very unique science cases where we can actually do global studies in Mars which is highly complementary to all the orbiters and landers. Because we can see actually where and how methane's moving across the entire surface of the body as opposed to doing flyby missions where we only get small little strips of the terrain and just little hotspots. With JWST, we get the full spectrum across the whole body. So we'll actually get to do full seasonal studies of very interesting molecules, such as methane, but also water and seeing where the water actually resides and how it moves across the body during its seasons. Giant planets. These are some of the most interesting things in our solar system. We have no idea what's going on in the most of the time. And they're absolutely stunning, especially at these wavelengths. JWST is very sensitive to storms, other atmospheric effects. And we'll actually even be able to see some of the aurora in these bodies. Especially the ice giants, we have no idea. All we've had access to for those bodies in space have been flyby missions. And they were brief and short lived. With JWST, it's actually perfectly designed to observe Uranus and Neptune. These bodies fit ideally in all of our IF use. So we'll be able to get global spectrum routinely and actually see how these bodies vary and we'll get significantly better images in the infrared than we've ever been able to obtain from the ground. The satellites of our outer planets are even more interesting. We now know that these things have volcanoes and they're constantly erupting or they're spurting out water or plumes of gas and dust. With JWST, we have a sensitivity that we can actually see these things and get the composition of them as opposed to just a brief snapshot or image as Hubble has only been able to obtain. So we'll have a nice cadence where we can actually monitor the geological activity of all these small bodies orbiting our planets. And Titan is one of the most interesting of all of them. We know Titan has a very rich chemistry. It has oceans, it has storms, it has a very dense atmosphere and it's very organic rich. Cassini has done amazing things and the Huygens probe has done amazing things for Titan. But as I said, that mission's ending in 2017. So JWST actually will be able to follow up all the work that's been done from Cassini and hopefully lead us to the next mission where we can actually do full-on follow-up, maybe landers or another orbiter in that system. And again, JWST will have the global imaging that Cassini really didn't have. Rings and satellites have always been a challenge and they're a huge question. We really don't know what most of the rings for these large bodies are actually made up. We know that they're icy or dusty but we don't know what kind of ice. So with JWST we have the sensitivity and the spectral resolution that we can actually learn what these things are made of and maybe even detect new satellites so even smaller moons just because we'll have that sensitivity. The outer solar system is full of these tiny little icy bodies known as trans-Neptunian objects or Kuiper belt objects. We really don't know what they're made of. They rarely come into the inner solar system. It's not like they're a comet. But whenever we get up close to them such as Pluto or the next New Horizons target, we learn a lot. We learn that they are organic rich. We learn that they can have atmospheres. We learn that they are very icy. So there's a lot of potential for learning what these bodies are actually made of and what that means for how the solar system formed and how other solar systems beyond ours actually formed. One of the most unique studies that came out of all of this work was looking into how we could do occultations. Occultation observations are extremely useful and give us so much information about the tiniest bodies in the outer solar system. Occultation science has been very successful with Sophia and a couple of other ground-based observatories. This is where the small body actually flies in between a nearby star or a bright object and you get the shadow imaging and spectroscopy where you can actually do the characterization of these really small bodies. You can even detect whether or not they have a, they're a binary or a triple body system by doing such measurements. So this will be a really unique science thing and JWST definitely has a sensitivity and the angular resolution would be these very small bodies that we can't even do with the current ground-based facilities. So with that I'm going to move on to status and I'm going to jump through this kind of quickly. So I want to give you what's, what the current status of JWST is since the replan in 2011. So I'll just step you through it. So I have sort of an outline of where our yearly themes were. So in 2013, we began instrument integration. In 2014, we started manufacturing the spacecraft. Last year, the end of last year, we began assembling the mirror. This year, our big highlight is to actually finish assembling the observatory including the full mirror, putting the instrument module on the back of the mirror and then putting the spacecraft bus onto the observatory. In 2017, we'll be testing the system routinely over and over and over again doing all the tests that we never did with Hubble. To make sure that this observatory is going to work the way that we expect it to. And then in 2018, we take it down to Peru where it'll be launched in late October. So I absolutely love this instrument because every time I give a JWST talk, everybody asks me why we can't service the mission. And basically the proof is in the pudding. If you look at the image on the left, this is our instrument science module. This shows you how complex, how packed in and how completely chaotic it is that we have no access to any of these instruments at any given time. In order to maintain or service any of these instruments, you have to take the whole thing apart. So we absolutely don't have access to maintain or service any of these instruments in the future. And ideally, it would be great to do, but it's probably cheaper instead of developing a whole spacecraft and robot to go and service it as well as replacing the instrument. It's probably cheaper just to build a new observatory in the long run anyways. So the picture on the right shows you that instrument science module with all the electronics component and the radiator. All of that sits on the back of the primary telescope. And this has been very successfully tested and integrated. It's ISUM is currently undergoing its final cryovac test with the four science instruments here at Goddard. It'll be completed soon within the next month. And with that, it will be delivered to the observatory or to the project as a complete package. As I said, that test is currently underway. There's, this is the third, there's been two more. This is the final one with our new detectors. There was a manufacturing glitch with our detectors that we found some degradation that we weren't very happy with. So new detectors were built and tested and installed on the instruments. And those are currently being tested as we speak. This is a very complex test. It's a massive cryo chamber. As you can see in this picture, the tiny little people standing at the bottom with respect to the massive structure. So to cool this entire chamber down, it takes about 20 days. Testing is about two months and then warming up is another 15 to 20 days. So it's quite a long process, but it's been a very successful test so far and everything's gone even better than anticipated. The telescope structure is also underway. We built two backplane structures. One we call the Pathfinder and one we call the Flight. The Pathfinder backplane was designed for multiple purposes. One was to verify that we could actually deploy the secondary mirror since this has to fold up for launch and then redeploy. We needed to make sure we could do that and successfully do that. It also gave us an opportunity to test installing the mirrors. A special crane was developed where we actually scoop up underneath each mirror and the installation is done ever so gently without touching or scratching the edges of each mirror. The Pathfinder is also testing the test equipment down at Johnson where we're doing an end to end optical test later this year. This is inside of that chamber. It's known as Chamber A down at Johnson Space Center. Chamber A is very famous. This is where the Apollo capsule was tested with astronauts actually getting in and out of it under vacuum. It was also in an aerospace myth video. So you might recognize it. Though it looks completely different now. It was completely refurbished and redone for JWST.  So the Pathfinder is there as we speak and going through a series of tests to actually test the optical test equipment which is the end to end optical test that Hubble never had. Had they have done it, we wouldn't have had issues during the beginning of that mission. So the flight version is actually complete and that Goddard, this is at Northrop Grumman right before it was delivered. And now it's sitting in our clean room and the mirrors are being installed. As of when I wrote this presentation, we had a number of mirrors that have been successful. When I sent the presentation last Thursday, this was a view of our clean room. So you can see that almost all the mirrors are now installed. It doesn't look like the picture I showed you earlier with the crane and a nice shiny gold mirror because that was one of our backup mirrors. All of our flight mirrors are being installed with covers on them. The sun shields also near completion. All the layers are just about done and all the engineering for them has been completely tested with a full scale model, including a full deployment test. So this is our full scale model and they had actually practice folding and unfolding this thing a couple of times which you can imagine was quite extensive, especially considering we have gravity which we won't have during deployment in space. The spacecraft bus is also complete and being delivered. So later this year, as I said, we're expecting to have our instrument science module completed within the next month or so actually. The mirror installation should be done very soon. I recommend you follow along on the webcam. The construction of the missions operations center at Space Telescope. So this is where Hubble's currently operated out of. They had to redesign the operation center for JWST just because it's so much more complex than Hubble and the staff is gonna be quite large. So they basically had to rebuild their operation center up there. But it's nearly done now. So in the spring, they start putting the instruments on the back of the primary telescope and then they do deployment and observatory commissioning plan. So this is making sure we know how we're actually unfolding the telescope when everything unfolds, that it's not done too quickly or too slowly. We don't want ice on any instrument or anything popping off too fast as we're actually deploying the telescope. So that'll be final soon. This summer, the cryocooler will be tested and delivered and installed on the spacecraft. And the spacecraft panel, the avionics box will be fully integrated. Then later in the year, we'll have the full end-to-end optical test on the Pathfinder before delivery of our full observatory down to Johnson. So we make sure that we're gonna know how to control the observatory as far as tuning the optics remotely and knowing how each one of those mirrors can actually be controlled and defined. Then in 2017, we start the observatory testing. So this is a picture of chamber A without the Pathfinder in it and actually from the outside. It is completely different than if you'd ever seen pictures of it before because now it's in its own clean room for the observatory's sake. It's absolutely massive.  Yes, this is a real picture and not an engineering depiction. This is what the full observatory is gonna look like inside of chamber A. You can see that it's just big enough that we can actually deploy the secondary and do the optical end-to-end tests. So currently, as I said, the Pathfinder's down there testing the optical test equipment which sits at the top or is housed at the top of this chamber. It's lowered here in the picture on the right where you can actually see that it's quite a complex series of instruments and testing devices for this test. But we don't wanna have to go put goggles on JWST or glasses. Okay, so then in 2018, it's launch and integration. So where are we and how do we get there? So right now, we're testing the ISIM or the Instrument Science Model. It's almost complete and we're putting the mirrors on the primary backplane and the secondary. Once those are both independently done, we then install the instruments to the observatory and this is called the Optical Telescope Assembly. That is then tested down at Johnson where we do the end-to-end optical test. And then meanwhile, the Sun Shield's going through INT. The spacecraft is, as I said, already completed and delivered. We assemble those down at Northrop Grumman after the optical test done at Johnson where the full Sun Shield Observatory spacecraft bus is installed to the telescope and the instruments. Everything's folded up, shoved in a rocket and launched. So here's a brief summary of what I just said and it gives you sort of a pictorial description of what it's actually gonna look like through that process. But I hope from all of this, you learn that JWST is going to be a phenomenal observatory. It's a fully capable observatory for detecting our first stars of our universe but even for looking at the big bright targets in their own solar system, including things like Mars, comets, the ice giants, the gas giants, their satellites, small bodies, and even those things that are flying across the Earth at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Where to learn more? Please visit us. There's multiple places including JWST.nasa.gov. Space Telescope or the Operations Center also has a website that's dedicated to JWST. This is also where you'll submit your proposals. The European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agencies also support JWST and you can find it through their webpages as well as our primary contractor Northrop Grumman. We have an extensive collection of pictures and videos so please look at our Flickr page. There's all kinds of social media and our webcam which I encourage you to watch over the next few weeks especially so you can see the actual telescope integration. My email is at the bottom of the page. Please feel free to email me or contact me if you have any questions. Also, if you're interested about the Solar System science in particular, there is a particular page dedicated to the Solar System science through the Space Telescope page. So with that, I'm gonna show you the launch video. I believe I have some time. So let me figure out how to do this. Wait, actually we are starting to run a little short on time. We have a few questions we'd like to ask if that's okay. Okay, do you want me to still play the video in the background or not? Let's not do the video in the background at the moment. Okay. Okay, we might still have time after we get through our questions. All right, no problem. Cool, first question is actually from Dustin Edgman. And he was wondering whenever, let's see, with the Hubble no longer being serviced, will we have any future plans for any Space Telescopes in the visible spectrum? Can the James Webb do anything there or is it all infrared straight? We hit the far end of the visible, but we aren't optimized to do observations. Right now, NASA has put out a call for supporting science and technology for the next generation telescope beyond JWST. And one of the initiatives is a UV and optical telescope that actually I think will go into the near infrared as well, not quite as far as JWST. But there are people thinking about what the follow-up or the actual successor to Hubble should be. There's also a number of ground-based observatories that are being built, even though they're not by the US per se. But there are a number of large 30-meter-class telescopes that are being built on the ground that should be ideal as well to support the optical spectrum. Cool, thank you. We have a couple of questions that are actually kind of related, so I'm gonna sort of bundle them here. John B. asked, why is it necessary to avoid the Earth's shadow by orbiting in the L2 point? And also, Jeffrey asks, there are room at L2 for more than one observatory. Yes, so L2 was where the Herschel space observatory was. It was actually an orbit as well, and the Planck mission. So these were two far infrared observatories that recently completed their mission that were provided through the European Space Agency. There's plenty of room out there still. We orbit at L2 basically because we do have a small solar panel and we are dependent on getting some power from the sun. But being in that orbit, we still have direct access to the Earth, which is why we get multiple points where we can do data uplinking and downlinking multiple times a day. Cool, thank you. Stuart asks, why will the James Webb be used to study Mars versus, he says there's quite a few probes in orbit and more will be added. So he's wondering why, what advantage the James Webb have versus the probes in their closer perspective. So we have a couple of advantages. I agree that nothing's gonna be the same as putting a rover on there and smelling it. However, if you wanna know, the rover's only gonna detect exactly what it's standing on.  And the same for an orbiter. It's only gonna detect what it's exactly orbiting over at that given time. And you only get small swaths of coverage at a time. They don't have a full global map that they can do within 30 seconds, for example. They have to do this over the course of a year or months. So JWST gets that nice snapshot, but we also get the spatial resolution not quite as good as an orbiter, obviously. But we do get nice spatial resolution, which is actually better than what we can do from the ground. And with respect to the ground, we cover wavelengths that we can't do from the ground. So that's where JWST really complements the science. We have a technical question here about the camera systems, I guess, on the James Webb. How old will the cameras actually be when it's actually finally put into orbit? So all the instruments were new technology developments. As I said, we have brand new detectors that we just got last year. So the detectors are actually only a year old now, maybe a year and a half. So whenever it's in orbit, they're only gonna be a few years old. And we haven't even completed them yet until the end of this cryovac test when the instruments are actually delivered to the project as complete objects. Cool, let's see. Oh, here's a really interesting one from Joe Wright. He heard that machinists were actually brought out of retirement to mill the instrument platform because some of their CNC machines couldn't tell when a piece might fail. Their tactile abilities, the human tactile ability could tell if the metal was being overstressed or not. Have you heard anything about this or? I actually haven't, but I really wouldn't be surprised. Oh, wow. We have some amazing people with experience that you just, you can't buy or can you produce as a machine. There's a lot of human factor that goes into this observatory, including when we're doing our testing, while we can run a cryovac test, for example, on all our instruments right now, we have a number of people that are supporting each instrument every single day, 24 hours a day, looking at that data, trying to oversee something that even our own technology and engineering couldn't detect. Cool, we have another good question here. Jeffrey asks, is the tracking for the James Webb done by reaction wheels or with fuel, like hydrogen thrusters are some combination of both? So we have reaction wheels and we have fuel. So most of the tracking isn't done with fuel. That's mostly for orbit stabilization and momentum unloading. But most of it is actually done with the crackers. Cool, and with that, is there any way to tell if there'll be a little, the reaction was a little bit more robust than Kepler's or are there extra redundancies built in or? We have more redundancy and we are not using the same ones as Kepler. Excellent. I think that might be a different contractor too with Kepler, I'm not just sorry. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I'm wondering, let's see what else we got here. We got a bunch now. Oh, let's see. Oh, Michael Overskier was asking, overacker, not overasker, not overasking is a very good question. How interested is the James Webb Space Telescope team in producing images to keep the public interested and helping maintain the positive attitudes and everything for future funding? Like the great, awesome pictures like Hubble and her shoulder. Actually, this is the best part about planetary science because the biggest press releases and images that ever come out of Hubble or even Spitzer actually were from planetary science. So that was one of the main drivers for getting a planetary scientist involved. But yes, there is a huge initiative. This is why we have so much social media, why we do these outreach events. We're really interested in what the public thinks about it. We have a plan for delivery of our first images and spectrum so everybody is able to see how fantastic the observatory is at the first glimpse. Cool. Another question actually about the observatory and seeing it, Joe Ray was asking when he was at a Goddard for training, he seemed that there is a tabletop model of the James Webb in like every building. Do you know of a source to get the model or is that just something special from the contractor? I think they're special. I've begged for one. I do know, I've heard of a few, what are they called? They're these online web sourcing funding projects, there is a group of students that actually make tiny little 3D models that you can buy. I did find one. We actually gave one away as a prize. So it's the unofficial one, but it's from Mesa Tech and they actually have, depending on how much you wanna pay for it, they have different models. One of them does do the panels unfolding. Oh really? It's something that I really consider. Yeah, I think things like that are great. There is also a Lego model, which I don't even have either. So, watch on eBay for the Lego model of JWST. Awesome. Oh, a question from, we have an anonymous question. Are there any concerns about the telescope being hit by any space junk or debris while in orbit? So we've done a couple of studies. Micrometeorites are our biggest concern. This is where having the five layers of the sun shield is actually quite a benefit for us. Because if we get one, the punctures, hopefully it's not big enough to puncture all five layers and create a light leak for us. So hopefully that we have that redundancy for the sun shields purposes and keeping the observatory cool. Things are gonna hit. We've also looked at things like even cosmic rays hitting our instruments or even just the observatory in general and how much that's gonna affect anything electronic wise within the observatory. And we've built in a lot of safety for that. A lot of grounding harnesses going throughout the observatory and making sure all the things that could get hit that have access to the outside are safe and not touching any instruments. Cool, we have a couple more questions.  We have to, it's 10 o'clock on Stephanie's clock and we gotta cut it short soon. But we know Dave, he raised his hand, he had a question. What would be the effect on space telescopes if for some terrible reason the James Webb happened to fail or got a submission cut short? I think it would be very detrimental. The whole community is now sort of on board and supporting JWST just because it's been the up and coming for so long and it stayed at the art and we really need a new space observatory in the near infrared through the mid-infrared just because we don't have access to that in space. So if something were to happen, I think it would be very detrimental. Like I said, NASA's already looking at what's gonna follow JWST. So if it fails, that's gonna be a huge hit and I would hate to think of what could happen for NASA if we weren't successful. But as I said, you saw how much time that's been devoted to testing all of our equipment, making sure everything's gonna deploy fine. It's the best we can do on the ground and hopefully it all works perfectly. We had a chat about this earlier and I remember you said, I asked you a similar question and you're just, we basically just were like, oh, it's just gonna launch and work. I don't think working for the project, I'm allowed to think of it. I think it's just still so fresh in everyone's minds because of Hubble and the famous servicing mission there. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why we're doing this and optical test down at John. You pointed out, they check it on the focus on the ground before launch. Yeah, everywhere is fully controllable and fully steerable. So that's sort of what we're testing here is to know how to actually do that full focusing on the ground so when we are deployed, we can do that remotely. Cool, we'll do our final question and I'm actually rounding up a couple of questions into this, they're similar. Bruce Nebin and James Rockford, they're asking, some of the science instruments are installed on what will be the, looks like the hot side of the observatory? No, they're on the cold side. Oh, okay, cool. So what kind of shielding and measures are there for just to handle like say any criminal mass ejections or any radiation bursts or stuff like that? Radiation hardening, I guess. Yeah, yeah, well all of the primary housing is rad hard, that has to be rad hard for anything launched in space. But we do have some access points that we do have shields. Most of our instruments are like I showed you are quite embedded and it's not easy to access them. Outside of all of that, there was another image that shows you how it's actually shielded and protected on the outside. But there are a few minor access points and that's what I was saying. We made sure anything that was within those access points actually isolated electronically such that it's not gonna zap our instruments or turn them off or burn them out in any way that would be detrimental. We've done tons of studies on this and in fact, they're still going on. We have people working all over the country on this. So we're anticipating it might, it could happen. Hopefully it doesn't, but if it does, we know how to save the observatory. Cool, awesome, the NASA magic. Cool, okay, just one brief one. After its launch, this is from John. How long will we have to wait until we see what the observatory is capable of doing? I guess when we get our great data is starting to come back. So commissioning's gonna take about 120 days from launch. So we have a couple of months where we actually have to unfold the telescope. It takes a full month to get to L2 and unfold the telescope. Which if you go to the deployment video, I'll actually try to find the link right now and put it in the chat for you. Thank you. Then you'll see how, where's my chat button? There it is. Okay, you'll see how long it takes. It actually gives you the timeline at the top so you can see how many days. So after that, we have to commission it. So we have to turn all the instruments on and test them one by one and make sure everything's working as it should. We need to make sure that we can move the telescope at 30 milli arc seconds per second. We need to make sure that we can actually tune the mirrors as we expected and we need to characterize the observatory. So we expect some dust to actually get on the mirrors as we launch. There's nothing we can do about that and as it's actually getting out to L2. Hopefully it's not too much but we will need to actually do a full characterization once we get out there. A few months. Yeah, it sounds like it. That'll be a tense few months I bet. Yeah, unlike Mars, we don't have the seven minutes of terror. I think we've got four months of terror. I don't know. Cool. Well, we're getting a little late. We have a bunch of questions. Would it be okay if I sent you a few of our questions via email and we could put it in another follow up article? Absolutely. Cool. Thank you so much. And yeah, Barry actually said and I think he speaks for everyone here. Thank you Dr. Malam for enlightening us all about the James Webb Space Telescope. Absolutely. Thank you. Cool. And take care and good luck with the snow tonight over there. We don't get it till Friday, so. Oh. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Awesome, we'll have a good night. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us and all the members out here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Awesome, take care.


Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with David Morgan of the Morgan Report. How are you today, David? I'm well. Thank you, Tracy. David, I stayed up late watching the first presidential debate last night, so I'm going to have to ask you the obvious first question. Depending on who wins, what is happening to silver and gold this fall? Well, you may not like my answer. I was only able to watch part of the debate. I was at the Toronto airport, and I got in on one of the streaming channels. But as far as I'm concerned, it's like changing the captain on the Titanic. I don't think at this point it really matters who's at the helm of United States as far as the precious metals are concerned. I think the overall emphasis will be higher prices over the next few years. Okay. You're talking higher prices. A lot of people are starting to get excited about silver. And of course, I think to myself, David has been leading that charge for quite some time. Is silver really on a bull market run right now, or what's happening with silver? Well, as you know, I spoke to the minds of money here recently, and that was one of the questions they wanted me addressed during my presentation. And I came up with three factors that for me, after studying the silver market for so long, one is, were the volume sufficient? In other words, was there enough interest in that market? The answer is yes, substantial interest in volume. The second is, did silver lead gold? And it finally did. It's been up as high as 40% year on year, and gold has been about 30%. So it's outperformed gold. That's the second factor we want to know. And lastly, we need to see the underlying asset or mining shares outperformed by a factor roughly of three to one. And that's taken place as well. So those three factors are all I need. I don't need 20 reasons. I just need those three to be assured that we're in a bull market. So we are in a bull market. We are. Of course, our investor Intel audience may know David Morgan as a silver and gold expert, but he's actually considered one of the top 25 economists in the world. So Christopher Ecclestone from Investor Intel sent me some questions to ask you for our investor intelligence economic data report. And he wants you to talk about property and the asset market in the United States, and what's happening with that right now. Well, like Toronto, there are areas that are very overvalued. I mean, really, if you look at real estate from an investment perspective, you have to treat it that way, which means what you return on investment. So if you buy an apartment or an apartment building or a single family residence, what you have to look at is what will it rent for? And will I get a return on capital? So if you put half a million dollars into a small apartment here in Toronto or other major cities in the United States, for example, and the return on investment is, let's say $1,200 a month, so you get $14,400 per year, what is that return on $500,000 investment? It's not really very high. So this is the way to really approach it. Now people don't do that generally. What they do is they speculate, and they say, well, some greater fool buy for a higher price because prices are going up. That's a momentum play, but it's very careful. It's called flipping. And you know all this stuff. So as far as I'm concerned, from a gut honest level, I think most real estate is overpriced in the major cities in the United States, and it carries across the board. I mean, it's in Toronto, it's in Vancouver, parts of Australia, throughout parts of Europe, et cetera. So are there deals in the real estate market, yes, but usually in the very smaller communities. And then he wanted me to ask you more specifically, do you feel that there is a property bubble building up? I'm assuming the answer would be yes, based on your last answer. Absolutely. There's really a couple of bubbles going, they all revolve debt because the debt markets we can talk about later, but real estate is basically debt finance. Very few people come in and buy property for cash. It happens occasionally. There have been some funds that were loaded up on cash a few years back, and they bought property for cash. They didn't know what else to do with it, and it wasn't a low at that time. But now it's finance. So you're either renting the money or you're renting the property. I mean, people don't think of that. So if you're renting money for practically nothing because of the zero-interest rate policy, you've got a cheap way to finance. But you also, again, have to look at what the return on that financing is. Is it positive or is it negative? So any other economic trends that you'd like to comment on at this time? Well, I think I'll just add on to the bond market. First of all, I think it's important, and most people know this, that the bond market and the stock markets are heavily correlated at this point in time. When you go back 30, 40 years, they were not correlated. Bonds were safe. They paid a high interest, and stocks were more risky, and they were dividend-paying stocks, but it was a different market, and they counterbalanced each other. This isn't true and hasn't been for a long time. By any measure, the bond market is in a huge bubble, probably the biggest in recorded history. And a subset to that, of course, are the equity markets, and by any measure or any metric you care to use, the United States stock market is very, very overvalued. Okay. Can you comment any further on that? Well, I think, and I'm not great at timing the stock market, but I don't think it can last a lot longer at these levels. It's in what's called a distribution pattern, which is a high-level consolidation. That's another way to talk about it. This distribution pattern is where the smart money is getting out into the public. The consolidation, which means at an $18,000 to $19,000 level, the smart money is selling their stock into basically the public. It could be pension funds, it could be some hedge funds, but basically they're unloading their stock, but they do it, and they parse it out slowly over time because if the big money moved big amounts of stock, of course it would crash the market. If there's huge volume buying or selling, you're going to move the market. So they just feed it into the market over time. So now we've got the weak hands holding the stock market higher, and the smart money has moved out. In fact, what's interesting is why that smart money has already moved into gold. They moved into gold and silver to some extent, but primarily gold early in the year, early in 2016. So the smart money is moving into gold, and I want to clarify a little bit, and silver, of course. You're here at the Minds and Money. It's a resource-directed event. What about the resource stocks? I mean, they've had a really rough time in the Toronto Stock Exchange over the last couple of years. Is this market also in trouble? I think it is. I mean, you get my opinion when you talk to me, Tracy. You've known me for a long time. I am of the belief that the resource sector overall isn't going to do that well on this next leg up. As the bond market comes down, the equity markets establish a more reasonable price. Real estate falls. I think we're in the contraction phase, and because of that, the only thing I think, well, not the only thing, but I think the precious metals will go up because of their money and because of the risk factor of these other markets. Also there are spaces like Lithium, and there are some things in Colbalt, and there are other metals that you know a great deal about and actually specialize in that will do well. But I think the overall resource sector probably isn't going to see the heyday that we saw between, let's say, 2000 and 2010, where China was leading this huge drive for copper and tin and nickel and cement and all these things that took place because of this huge build out of China. Could be wrong. I hope I am, but I really think that it's only going to be certain sectors of the resource sector this time. Can I ask you about your own personal investments? Is there something you would share with our investment audience? Well, as you know, I started another company. It's called LaMaria Royalties. It's a royalty and streaming company. It's based here in Toronto. I have a great group of people that have been there and done that with premier royalties, and we have several meetings set up this week on what we're doing. We've already completed our first deal with Haas Shield, which is one of the better-known names, and we have a strong group of investors that are backing us, and we're having a good time doing it. Well, David, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.


The report concludes with many recommendations for policymakers and world leaders. Which are the most urgent and where are the quick wins? It's the role of any policymaker to judge the quick wins against the longer term priorities with hopefully a balance being found between the two. With regards to broadband and the report, it calls for greater emphasis to be given to universal access. We've had a large number of private sector players emerging, some with global status. But commercial incentives don't always deliver socially or collectively optimal outcomes. So there is a role for social priorities to be considered as well. We've had the Uber for transport and the Airbnb for accommodation. And now we're waiting for the Uber for education or language learning.


Establish the award to honour an individual, organisation or company for their outstanding contributions to the performance community. Edwin Booth Award, back in 1983, went to the Royal Shakespeare Company and since then has gone to such worthy recipients as Richard Foreman, Tony Kushner, Karen Finlay, Woody King, Jr. and last year's recipient, Marie Irene Fornes, but tonight we are here to celebrate perhaps our largest group of honorees yet, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. So to kick things off and to introduce Reverend Billy and the choir in a ringly worshipful manner, I would like to welcome the newly minted Doctor, Dan Venning. Thank you all very much. I'm Dan Venning. I recently finished my dissertation in the PhD program at theatre here. Thank you. I wrote on Shakespeare in 19th century German nation building, not contemporary activist performance, but I wanted to speak because during my decade at the Graduate Center, Reverend Billy's work has been a crucial part of my theatre going, my scholarship and my very experience here in New York City. I'm here to talk about Reverend Billy, Savitry and the Church of Stop Shopping, but because their work is unique, I'm going to borrow a bit from their form. Because this is Billy, this isn't a speech of introduction, it's an invocation. And it wouldn't be an invocation if I didn't start with a few bars from one of their songs from their 2004 album, a song with some lyrics about issues that are still very important to them. So you'll have to excuse me. And I don't know what it is, buys a lot less, here's a million bucks for a breath of fresh air, okay take a number, the line's over there. Thank you for helping out, I needed it. That song links issues that remain important to their work, consumerism and our need for a clean earth. Reverend Billy, Savitry and the Church of Stop Shopping have created a revolutionary and unique kind of performance in New York, stretching the boundaries of performance art and activism and making a great mark upon even agnostics like myself. So my invocation is going to be a personal narrative of these interactions I've had over the last decade with Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. I moved to New York in August 2006 to come to the Graduate Center, less than a month after moving here in September, I went to see Reverend Billy's tent revival as the first doctoral theater students association outing that year at the Spiegel tent down in the South Street Seaport. I remember the entrance of the choir, much like today, singing Stop Shopping. I remember their song No Logo, Are You My Lover or My Logo, that lyric still stuck with me. I remember pledging not to go into Victoria's Secret for a full decade because at the time Victoria's Secret printed their magazines, which they sent out en masse on new paper. They refused to use recycled paper. It was an incredible waste of resources mixed with blatant consumerism. And so I stood up and pledged, admittedly it was easier for me than for some others to stay out of Victoria's Secret. This is a point I'll come back to later. I come from a place of great privilege, and Billy is committed to the principles of diversity and helping give voice to those who must be heard. There were a couple of people who didn't stand up from our group. Jean Graham Jones razzed them about it afterwards. She did too, yeah. So Reverend Billy is a revivalist preacher, except instead of preaching fundamentalist Christianity or ultra-conservative dogma, he speaks out against consumerism, giant corporations, and various infringements upon public space. He talks about the freedom of speech, human rights, and the environment. As their website, www.revbilly.com, notes, much of their work is, quote, devoted to inspiring people to challenge the consumerism, racism, and militarism that are killing our planet. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping offer up a DIY spirituality for activists, a heady mix of humor, insightful critique, passionate commitment, emotional catharsis, an example after example of creative, joyful, earth-inspired, direct action, end quote. As Savitri told me on the phone a couple weeks ago, much of their work now is devoted to preserving our fragile earth, but they've returned to their original moniker, the Church of Stop Shopping, since that's what they've always been known as. It's the earliest days of performing exorcisms on cash registers and invading Starbucks. Their name has changed, so in 2008 they were the Church of Life After Shopping. They became the Church of Earth Aluia, but they're back to what we've always known them as now. My next interaction with Billy was in June 2008 when I went to the Mermaid Parade, and there they were, the King and the Queen. Savitri and Billy were staunch defenders of that playground of New York, striving to keep it from commercial development and gentrification. After the parade, Savitri went on a hunger strike, broadcast on the internet, to protest this planned development. She writes about their work in their co-authored book of essays, The Reverend Billy Project, from rehearsal hall to super mall with the Church of Life After Shopping, University of Michigan 2011, which I reviewed in TDR. The book describes their interventions, protests that landed them in jail that transformed corporate policy and the things against which they protest, like environmentally dangerous dams in Iceland, the Arkadon Mega Mall, a consumerist paradise in Berlin's Potsdamer plots, or American Idol, finally ending now, which they describe as demonstrating, quote, consumerized democracy at a low point, money the medium through which all else flows. Their book also demonstrates the slippage between Bill Tal and the performer and Reverend Billy the character. At times it's unclear where Tal's voice ends and Reverend Billy begins. That's because he has this total belief in his work that is beyond admirable. In 2009, Reverend Billy ran for mayor, challenging Bloomberg who ran as a Republican and who almost exactly two years later would use police force to kick out the populist Occupy movement in the middle of a cold night. Billy was backed by the Green Party and voting for him was one of the few times that I haven't voted Democrat. At Athens, the Association for Theater and Higher Education in 2011, I met Savitry and Bill in person to do an interview for Ecumenica. At the conference, Billy did a solo performance and then the next day they spoke on a panel in conversation with Elisa Solomon, Jill Dolan, and former Booth Award winners Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of Split Bridges. This was in the historic, opulent, expensive Palmer House Hilton Hotel, a hotel like many with a Starbucks under its lobby, a hotel that I couldn't afford to stay in as a graduate student. They had just come from San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. We talked about their work, their philosophy, their activism, plural, and their performance. Their activism and their performances are one in the same. We talked about how the causes for which they perform are linked, too. In Billy's words, there is a relationship between, quote, the Earth's crisis, climate change, extinction waves, even what seem to be tectonic events as well, these great shifts in the physical systems of the Earth, the relationship of the grand scale of such extreme Earth events and our local politics such as public space and housing and immigration. We talked about the way the Reverend persona gives Billy the freedom to shout at people. There are only certain characters that have that permission, he said. Rock and Rollers and Preachers are two of them. Anticipating debates about net neutrality, we talked about how they predicted corporations would try to take over the internet. And we talked about my agnosticism, my imperfections. I go to Starbucks, they sign my book, quote, Onward, Brother Daniel, the lion won't bite if you get out of S-Bucks. I'm a leftist, but I'm a deeply sinning one. Billy, in contrast, has total belief in what he does. He creates real revolutionary performance. It's nearly 10 years after I moved to New York to get my degree, and it's a real honor to be able to speak at this event. Reverend Billy's revolutionary performance has transformed the landscape of New York theater. That's what the Booth Award is about. But he's also transformed my experiences as a theater goer, as a scholar. And more than that, he works to transform the world into a better place. So to that, let's all say hallelujah. So now it's my chance to turn the mic over to a doctoral student here, Nina Mercer, who is presenting our sermon. Everybody, welcome. I'm glad to be here to give this sermon. I don't think I've ever given a sermon before in my life. And I'm sitting over there, and I'm like, I'm a first-year student. I can't believe they've been giving me the mic. It's kind of dangerous, because I'm not quite woven in all the way yet. But I'm here, I think, mostly as a theater practitioner. And I'm here to kind of talk about and acknowledge the bridge that we must strengthen between the academy and the street, where the performance happens. So I'm going to start with a quote or a passage, actually, from Amiri Baraka's essay, Bopra Theory. Theater in the United States is obstructed in its development by the same forces that obstruct the general positive development of human life and society. Frequently, we are stalled by our very amazement at the rulers of this society, shrieking for years of their superiority when one has only to look around to see what a mess they have made of everything and what a bizarre lie this superiority is. Even lower animals cause less trouble to the planet. But the superstructural control of intellectual development is critical to our penetration of socially dynamic aesthetic theory in this country with its fake democracy and real imperialism. We must step outside the parameters of this society's version of just about everything. Often, we seek to use as one alternative practices found in the oldest root of performance, ritual. But not in a frozen or atavistic way. We take the wholeness, the freshness, the penetrating emotionalism and spiritual revelation and renewal, the direct connection with what the ancients meant. We want to educate, but we want to do that through the transformation of the human consciousness. We want to open it. We want to show the known world to be as irrational as it actually is. And we want to bring the approaching epoch of human quality closer to reality through our open embrace. We want news. We want olds. We want the constant beat of life in its material existence. That's Amiri Baraka, Baraka Thea. What is expressed in this passage from Amiri Baraka's essay, Bapra Theory, is what brought me to commit to the wildly generative life of performance and theater as a cultural worker. And it is, in my opinion, a kindred call to action to the years of work and inspiration provided by our honorees, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. And here we are at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, not in the streets or at a rally, but in this very privileged space where ideas eventually become theoretical discourse, where we write essays that become conference papers and books shared among a community of peers. What's the connection? Well, I believe honoring the work of Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir here is crucial in this city we love, New York City, and its surrounding boroughs of Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, or the Boogie Down, as I like to call it, and all of its pulsing streets and booming subway platforms, its irrepressible people driven to life, its loud talk and radical action, its fight against gentrification and eviction and police brutality. We here must be abridged to the city's constant beat of life. In that way, we deepen our ties to this culture and the people, celebrating their voices and concerns. This is the work, too. This, too, is why we are here. Today, as we honor Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, let us do so as scholars who choose to acknowledge cultural worker Toni Kade Bambara's call when she said, the work of the writer, and in our case, the scholar, is to make the revolution irresistible. While we certainly can't do that on our own, nor should we want to try, my hope is that we will constantly interrogate our motives, that we will affirm our connection to community, and that we will practice that method in our research, writing, and teaching, realizing that we do play a part in transforming society when we open up our field and acknowledge those who have been committed to agitation, protest, and inspirational performance for years. Thank you. Once you give an event to your neighbor for Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. This next song we will sing for you is Get Home Safe, Man Down, Brother Down. Through it, we watch the journey of a week in New York City, and we celebrate life, but we also realize that life is not always easy. Talking all the morning, get home safe. Tuesday schools are early, wandering through. John Sims from Florida, the sunny beaches of Florida. I was on the beach yesterday. The Reverend Billy crew called me last week and said, yeah, we need to have you up here. And I really appreciate being able to be here and celebrate this moment with these incredible artists. You know, I'm really happy to be here and to recognize these folks, these soul savers. That's what they are on some level. And they've been doing this critical work, not only in New York City, but all across the country. That's what makes it so fascinating and beautiful. And, you know, I'm a political artist, and I've been working in the trenches on the Confederate flag for over 15 years. And before it was cool to talk about it before it was in the media when my art friends told me, why are you doing this, that kind of thing. And, you know, it was very important because I had the opportunity to go to Gettysburg and lynch the Confederate flag there in 2004. And then last year I organized 13 flag funerals across the South before the Charleston shootings. But a lot of that kind of vision came with identifying these incredible artists that have come before, like Miri Baraka who I've worked with and Karen Finley who I think has gotten this award before. And also Reverend Billing, his incredible choir, who's been very inspirational being able to take important issues out of the classrooms, out of the books, and take them and deliver them right to people's hearts, right? And connect them to the legislation, and collect them to the voting, and to where really matters. So I really appreciate this, you know, being able to learn from these important artists that delicate dance between art and activism, and showing the importance of performance art. You know, as a device to engage the process that matters the most, the spiritual one, you know, the emotional one, the one that changes hearts and behavior and personal politics. So this event is not only an opportunity to celebrate the fearless ways that art can lead to our most sensitive and difficult conversations, but it's also to bear witness to the evolution of a super intelligent creative performance system that has worked long and hard to counterbalance the rising social economic pathologies that have brought sickness upon our humanity, our community, and our precious mother earth. This is also an opportunity for us to be inspired by this great work of Henri's today so that we may be energized to become part of the solution in that part of the problem. So my testimony here, have a testimony. All right, ready? All right. In between the spaces of advocacy and performance that was born a preacher, a real preacher from the state of Minnesota, preaching and teaching and reaching realness and truth from the pulpit of common sense and social justice. This preacher, that preacher, was not born as such but created in the performance spaces of San Francisco and the streets of New York City. And in time, there was a square, time square, where this preacher man preached and the folks clapped and the choir was born. And with his partner and the choir and holy calling to a perversive, to a subversive performative intervention, Reverend Billy led the attack on American consumerism and militarism through satire, beyond the robes and to the core mission of saving minds, communities and our planet. Earth, hallelujah. Commits in burning man, it's the books running for man. Quite escape it and we miss him so much. In fact, the song that you were singing is a song that we wrote with Benny so many years ago. And one of the last times we saw him, he was playing it on a gigantic grand piano in Charleston, West Virginia. The thing about Benny is that everyone always gathered around his piano to sing. He had a special ability to attract singers. And finally, Derek McGinty, who John mentioned earlier, who an irrepressible force in the world really, in this community, a great dancer, great singer, great performer, great soul, who we lost to AIDS six years ago. I know because it was just a couple of months after my daughter was born. And thank God that she was born or I would have died of grief, I think. But these three men came to New York to make theater, to be on stage. And they were singers, dancers, composers. And they came here like kings with gifts and we were so lucky that they shared those gifts with us. I'm grateful to have been on the boards with them all over the world and all of you too. So they would be honored to be here, I think, because they were theater people. We're not all theater people, but those three really, heart and soul, they were theater people and would just be beyond happy to join this incredible list of people you've honored in the past. New York can really break your heart, you know? I know you know what I mean. So how do we keep going? Lately, I've been hearing John Coltrane in my head, his voice doubled and tripled and quadrupled just saying, I love supreme, I love supreme, I love supreme.  She's like, what is it? I was like, it's John Coltrane. Nah, she's an old beatnik so she got that. Anyway, today I really want to extend my gratitude to the brave warriors of ACT UP, those shining stars and the thousands of them of humans, many gendered humans who lost their lives to AIDS, so many performers and actors and show people. And I walk around and I miss them. I think they could have been right there. They could have been doing that. They might have been doing that. I think I see this sort of negative space of that whole community of people. So thank you. I dedicate all of this to you tonight. Amazing people, thank you.  I know that. And I also would like to take a moment to thank Reverend Billy, who's not speaking tonight because he's been on the road for three weeks and has had 20 gigs in 23 days and we thought just this once, we'll just talk to him. Billy, I want to thank you. You carry the wilds in you. You carry wildness in a way I can barely describe, but more than any human I've ever known, you have the wilds in you. And I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful. You are so dangerous and strange. And thank you. And because I'm an old school, I like to thank my teachers. And I think all of us here have a lot of teachers to thank. We wouldn't be here without them, so let's all say together. Thank you, teachers. Thank you, teachers. Here we are at CUNY. I know many teachers come from CUNY, so thank you in advance for your future teaching and whatever teaching you may have done in the past. Among our teachers, Sidney Lanier, who was Billy's mentor and really talked him into this character, and the thousands and thousands of species of mushrooms and nutes and moss and trees and mammals and fish and birds, jellyfish and I'm leaving lots of them out, but dragonflies, all the other species who are not in this room with us tonight, we thank you because you are really our teachers now. And that is who we have to really listen to now, those other creatures and the earth itself, so respect. Thank you all so much. Well, so much has been said about our dearest Reverend Billy Savitri and the incredible Stop Shopping Choir, so I'll just say a couple little short, short. Do we keep going, Savitri? We need each other and someone who's really kept me going has been the Reverend Billy and all of these people because we are sisters in street performing. We work on the street. There's nothing between us and them.  It's scary and it's dangerous and it doesn't make any money and then Trump wins and it goes on and on and on and we need each other so badly and this community has served me so greatly and when I think of the Reverend on the streets in Times Square and your very, very early days out there by yourself or in those Disney stores just changing up that text and changing up all that stuff in there, I know what that feels like and when I think of you doing that and I know that you're doing that, I know that I can keep going on and when I see all of you doing it, I know that I can keep going on and when you come and play at my benefits it really helps us keep going on too. So your hero, your saints, your inspirations, your angels, your my strength and I thank you so much and at this point we wanna open the floor to you all students of theater and choir members and friends and general public and say does anybody out here wanna give a little testimony to the choir, to Reverend Billy, to Savitri, a word or two of love from your heart. We open it up now to the world. I think for a minute. Well, I just tell you this, you know there was this nurse and she was at work and she was like, oh my God, what is wrong with this person? I gotta take some notes here.  Okay, now during that moment you thought of something that you wanted to say.  It was a dog storming on. Actually, no, it was a very, very, very hot evening, 2004 and it was during the RNC. That night was when the cops went after all the bikers in critical mass and chased them over to St. Mark's Church. And we, a whole bunch of people we stayed inside in solidarity while the cops were on the outsides. And while I was hanging out, it was so hot but I heard some music going on.  So I go in and I see a choir and as hot as it was, they all had robes on. I was like, this is insane. And I'm looking and I see that man in front of the choir and he says, children, the reverend's hot. Do you mind if I take my clothes off? And I'm like, oh, here we go.  But these people are psycho. And it's kind of, you know, but you know, yeah, they're psychos, so am I. So it's like, ah. And I look in the corner and I see this woman with her hair in a handkerchief, wild, wild, unruly, beautiful hair wrapped up in her bandana. And I don't know why I got this thought. I said, that's his wife. I've never seen these people before in my life. And so it was fast forward into a few months later. It's 2005, it's January. And I used to write for this Anarchist newspaper, The Shadow, and the editor tells me, you gotta go over and interview Reverend Billy. He's over at Red Square. I know he has rehearsals there on Sunday. So I go over there, hey, hi, can I interview, I'm gonna interview for The Shadow. And he just looks at me.  And he sits me down to where everybody's singing. And he sits me over to this wonderful woman over here, this diva. And everybody starts singing. And I said, why am I sitting here? I don't sing. I can't sing. Why am I doing here?  And the end of the show, I mean, end of rehearsal, he says, come back next Sunday. And I've been there ever since. Now who else wants to testify? Any more testimony from the choir? I see a soulful soul right here. So I came to the choir in 2009 in the midst of Billy running for mayor. And I think one thing that's lost in a lot of people when they think about the choir is how much of a community, the individuals in the choir actually are. And how much we hang out outside of singing and how much we rely on each other and support each other in all of our endeavors and make babies with each other too. Yeah. It's really trippy to leave one place. I moved from Miami in 2009, sort of like running away from conservative Cuban parents and a lifetime of all of that. And finding this family of 40 people who just are the most open and the most giving group of people you've ever met, really. And just like any family, there are frustrations and there are conflicts and there are all types of things, but they're over above everything else. There's so much love. And I think that just is reflected in like every time we're on stage, I think people feel that. And I think that's what opens people up to what the choir has to say. And I'm forever grateful for both of you. You're, I can't think of two people who are more deserving of this award because you guys, we're a community because of you two and as a product of it. And yeah, we all go off on our own things, but at the end of the day, it's always Billy with the mic in the front. That keeps us coming back. So thank you. That's it. That's all I wanted to say. Donald. So a friend of mine said like, knew I like to sing a lot and he just invited me to join a gospel choir. I was like, whoa, gospel music, sure. You know, I've really never done that. I was mostly into medieval music and Renaissance music. Gospel, sure, why not? And it ended up being the church of stop shopping gospel choir, which was a real surprise. But the program that we were doing, this was like probably the, the iteration of this current choir was for the, to save the Poe House, which NYU was bound and possessed to tear down. And real Reverend Billy was bound and possessed to save. And like when out of his way and several times got arrested many times and we had this amazing show at the new school. And after the show happened, we all got up and we all had like little candles and things and we walked down to the Poe House. And the point was going to be, we were going to read the Raven. So we get there and Reverend Billy didn't have his glasses. So he grabs me, kind of knows me and probably knows I can probably read and make. And be kind of fabulous. And like, so he gives me the bullhorn and I'm like leading this huge crowd of people reading the Poe House, I mean reading the Raven. And that's going beautifully, beautifully. And suddenly like I'm out of the corner of my eyes. I'm seeing we are being encroached by the police. They're getting closer and closer and they're clearly not going to put up with this for too much longer. And we're only about halfway through the poem. And I'm kind of going, and I have like a church job the next morning and like, you know, like sort of Christmas time. And I'm wondering, what's in my pocket? Ooh, I really hope we don't get arrested. Because I could be in real trouble. Luckily, they only arrested Reverend Bill. So I knew I am in for a terrific run and believe me it has been. And I just love you all and just all the family.  And it's just been just like such a beautiful, beautiful experience and family. And just being out into public and like public space and like really taking it back. It's thrilling. Thank you. One more? Is there one last one? Are we gonna read? So. Two. I joined this choir last year and prior to joining this choir, joining this choir, I was one of those devil's children who never felt the Holy Spirit during evangelical sermons. And I mean, I actually found a church where I can feel it. So maybe that's a better, that's a nice congregation I joined. I feel like I actually joined a worthwhile church. I really got into activism actually in the Graduate Center here with a professor known named Anastasenko. And I learned about this thing called the transformative activist stance. But I never realized that you can, you can have that transformative activist stance in an art context. So after I found out about the choir, I was like, I have to join this because you can be an activist and an artist at the same time and perform. And this is like, still, I feel like I'm in a dream right now because I still cannot believe that you can perform and protest at the same time. It's very new to me. And I also love the community. Hello, I'm Laura Newman and with Donald we're two of the oldest members. I joined, I was at that Poe show, but as far as origin stories go, which I think is the theme here, why we're here. And my origin story was the show previous to that one at the Culture Project, which was also completely sold out. And I was brought there by Stephen Duncan in an academic context. It was part of the Gallatin program at New York University where I had managed to find out that you could take an anthropology class and get history credit. And that was really sweet. And so I did that instead of studying the Civil War again. And I ended up being put into this class all about activism. And I was a theater major at New York University. I wanted to be a Broadway singer and all this kind of stuff. And suddenly I was in this really fascinating environment looking at how life is theater and theater is activism and activism is communication and communication is spiritual. And there were like big bold themes kind of arising. And I started to realize that I wasn't studying how to sing and dance. Like I was studying the nature of reality. And so when we went to the Reverend Billy show, I was literally converted. And this is why I joined the group, why I think our work is really powerful and why I'm a fan of it as much as I am a participant in it. I went to a show at the Culture Project and sat there as just a normal kind of liberal arts theater kid working at Starbucks and wondering how I was gonna make money. And at the end of the show, I became an activist. And I actually went outside and helped perform an illegal activity holding a slingshot and while people put paintballs in it and threw them at an advertisement for about.com. And it was just exhilarating. The police came, we ran away. That was like part of it. You know, like I ran down this alley and I was like, what is this? Like, it was so exciting.  A, got me out of my seat and B, like put me in the street and made me perform something with a group of strangers that was really passionate and strange and illegal and felt right, you know? And I grew up in the Episcopal Church, which is very much about pump and circumstance and the British traditions of Anglican music and choir like collars that go like this, little coffee filters, you know? You stand very still and sing Mozart. So for me to A, have that revelation as a theater performer and writer. The spiritual side of it is just as important for me. I had started to disentangle myself from the Christian church around the same time and to find an outlet for that faith and that like conviction, you know? Where instead of singing about Jesus, I could sing like the First Amendment and it would feel like the same feeling in my body of like, I believe and I like that ecstatic spiritual state that I was supposed to give up because I wasn't Christian anymore. You know, I didn't have to do that. So I am who I am because of all of you and Billy and Savitri and it's been an amazing journey. It's been almost half my life. I've been in this group. I joined when I was 20 years old, so thank you. See us off and then if you wanna join us upstairs for some Breaking of the Bread and some wine, just make sure if you're not a GC person to bring your program with you so that you don't get stopped by security. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.