Distilling down the complex logistics of designing and building a multi-billion dollar satellite into an informative and entertaining film, Nathaniel Kahn’s “The Hunt for Planet B” is a entertaining and insightful look at the creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch later this year, and the scientists and engineers who contributed to it. Foregrounding the contributions of many women to the process, including MIT Professor Sara Seagar, Webb Engineer Amy Lo, Astronomer Maggie Turbull and Jill Tarter, who served as the inspiration for Ellie Arroway from the novel and film “Contact,” Kahn’s film oscillates between providing an overview of exoplanets, planets outside of our solar system that possibly sustain life, and the massive process of putting the Webb telescope together. Humanizing the process, and showcasing the sheer magnitude of such an undertaking, “The Hunt for Planet B” is a short, thoughtful, rumination on the cosmos.
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The film begins by tracking the institutional history of exoplanet research, a field that is in many ways still in its infancy. As Dr. Seagar recalls, while applying for jobs out of grad school, she would often face pushback for her research, as astronomers would chafe at the idea of looking for life outside our solar system. Kahn does a good job of tracing how the nascent field has grown in the intervening years, noting how, within the span of a few decades, we went from having no concrete evidence of exoplanets to being able to map out adjacent solar systems.
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Jill Tarter, who has been at this longer than most of the other subjects, also notes the difference between their scientific work and those who are hunting for aliens, creating a distinction that outsiders are all too ready to conflate. As Kahn cuts between these women, and some other amateur astronomers, a collective sense of wonder permeates throughout the film. These people are looking for the slightest change in a star’s light across entire solar systems, an often fruitless endeavor that is all the more thrilling when they find something.
While Kahn’s approach is introductory, moving quickly between establishing the field, the researchers, and the project, his approach nevertheless foregrounds the humans taking part in the process, and the ways in which such an undertaking requires interactions between an ever-growing field of stakeholders. More than once, Kahn cuts to a congressional hearing, in which congressmen and women lambast the scientists for their expensive undertaking, openly decrying the ever-inflating budget. Yet, as “Planet B” showcases, trial and error are essential to the process. As a group of engineers and scientists circle around the Webb sunshield, slowly cranking it open, only for a cord to break and the entire mammoth project to be shut down, one can see the minutiae that goes into exploration.
The Webb telescope, the promised replacement for the Hubble, has been almost fifteen years in the making, beset by constant delays and transition and will, hopefully, be launched in Oct. 2021. Yet the arbitrary deadlines that are set, mainly by the higher-ups, often miss the beauty of exploration for the tangibleness of results. Who knows that the Webb might find when it finally peers out into the abyss, but that not knowing is not a flaw in the system, but a reason that such people like Seagar do the work that they do.
“Planet B” is sometimes too scattered in its approach, jumping between subjects and locations in a frantic pace, as it attempts to cover not only the science, but the lives that the scientists are living. By attempting to provide a totalizing portrait of Webb, in addition to the entire field of exoplanet research, Kahn’s film might be taking on too much. Yet the film never forgets the wonder that keeps these people going. Many admit to hoping that they’ll find life on another planet, whether that be microbial or otherwise, but almost all acknowledge that the chances of them living to see the fruits of their research are slim. For Seagar, Lo, Turnbull, and Tarter, the process is the most illuminating part. If “Planet B” is less than a sum of its parts, ending before the Webb is launched, and lacking overall closure, it’s still a wonderfully observational portrait of exploration. [B+]
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