Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Louis Noel, a recent graduate from Rice University and Longitude fellow.

Our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope connected us with scientists, engineers, and program managers. Along the way we discovered there are public outreach positions at NASA. We were curious about these roles and what their day-to-day activities entailed, like how they managed communicating complex engineering missions to lay audiences.

I had an opportunity to speak with Peter Sooy, Public Outreach Director at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. It was fascinating to hear about the NASA public events around the world and discovering that Peter was the outreach lead for both the Webb Telescope and the Roman Telescope that is next in line. His interesting insights and engaging stories made this episode a must to include into the JWST series as a Sound Bytes Extra.

We started our conversation with Peter telling me what a typical day looks like for him in his role.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Peter Sooy
My job is to lead the public outreach for two missions at Goddard. So, it’s the James Webb Space Telescope and the Roman space telescope. On a typical day, I’m finding new events for these telescopes to participate in, to connect with the wider public. So, there’s a lot of planning that goes into that, emailing, planning out events leading up to them and then actually running the event. I was just in Baltimore on Friday, running an event at the library there to celebrate the Webb first anniversary of science. First anniversary was July 12th. I had the event on July 14. I planned it for a few months. We took over this whole three storey library, had five different activities, two talks. The library was great. We talked all about Webb to folks in inner city, downtown Baltimore. It was great.

Louis
That’s fascinating. Sounds like a really rewarding, sort of a lot of work, but ultimately pays off in these sorts of fun events.

Peter
There’s just like a lot of office jobs. I do a lot of emails, a lot of calls, a lot of Zooms, but it is cool to see an event go from start to finish in two months and see the work that goes into it, and then actually have the product of the event at the end. So, it is rewarding in that way. You’re right.

Louis
Great. Well, I’d like you to walk us through your journey to your current position as public outreach lead. What key experiences played a significant role in guiding you to the role?

Peter
So, I’ll start, I’ll go all the way back. I went to the University of Maryland College Park, got a degree in journalism, and I was interested in sports. So, I was like, oh, I’ll do sports writing. My degree is in print journalism, so it tells you how old I am, I guess. And then when I graduated, I went into the Navy, where the Navy needed nuclear submarine officers. I did that for about 18 months. It was not a tremendous fit, but I was able to try my hand at engineering. It didn’t go so well. I didn’t love it. I got out of the Navy. And I got into engineering, again, working in natural gas drilling. I worked in rural Pennsylvania, the mountains of Pennsylvania, drilling for natural gas, again, engineering. I did better this time, but again, wasn’t best fit for me. Then I took a job at NASA Goddard in an administrative role. And then kind of parlayed that into working on the communication side on the outreach side, connecting with the public about NASA, what NASA was up to at Goddard in Maryland. And fast forward, now I work for these two flagship NASA astrophysics missions. It’s kind of the best crossover, where I have a background in writing, about talking about things with the general public. And then I tried my hand, like I said, in engineering, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds where I talk about engineering, but don’t have to actually roll my sleeves up and do the engineering. So, it’s a nice compromise of what I enjoy and what I enjoy talking about. And I’ve really enjoyed sharing the successes and accomplishments of Webb and more recently Roman, with the public.

Louis
Yeah, really looking forward to the Roman Space Telescope. What are the main goals of NASA’s public outreach programs? And how do they align with the broader mission of NASA?

Peter
This is a great question. Simply put, the goal of NASA public outreach is to share and inform the public, share with the public about what NASA is doing. That’s the simplest way. And the broader mission of NASA is, you know, different depending on who you ask, but to explore, to learn, to understand our place in the universe. In some way of saying that, so it kind of fit a little bit hand in glove where a lot of times, the scientists and engineers at NASA are doing this mission of exploring, of developing of getting us into space and outreach is part of the whole communications goal of sharing with the public in a clear and concise manner. What they’re doing is really out of this world, cheesy to say, but out of this world engineering and science, how to explain it and communicate it as broadly as possible to the eighth grade reading level.

Louis
Yeah, that was a great answer to a very broad question. What are other types of communications or outreach programs at NASA? How are they similar and different to your role?

Peter
There’s a whole office of like, general communication, news stories, you put out help run, like our social media presence, like the NASA Goddard, or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram pages, which is a ton of work. There are millions of followers there. So those are some of the communications programs at Goddard. And then a lot of missions have outreach as well. So, it’s a sliding scale, like if a mission is kind of just getting off the ground and just getting started, they really don’t have a robust outreach presence, because they’re just trying to get the mission started.

Step one is to have the plan for what you’re going to build, what it’s going to study how it’s going to get into space. And then once that’s kind of established, and there’s a good schedule, and everything’s moving along, then you can say, oh, we want the public to learn about this, let’s get a outreach team organized. A lot of times, there’s not a dedicated person whose full-time job is to work on outreach for this mission. Like I said, I work pretty much half on Roman half on Webb. So, these two really large missions have half of me. A lot of times, there’s like an average person that does like handle all Heliophysics, like everything about the sun, everything about the moon. So that’s a lot of different missions under their portfolio, and they come up with outreach plans to support those missions as best they can.

Louis
I see, yeah, that’s something I wouldn’t have expected.

Peter
It’s nice to meet people and talk to them, and them be friendly and open and receptive to what NASA is up to. So, it’s kind of like a morale booster for me. And it lets me know that this it’s being well received.

Louis
Yeah. And I think it’s especially important for children or young adults, because these are the people that are going to be inspired to work on, hopefully this next generation of science. When you’re designing these outreach programs, do you generally try to skew any of the content or language towards a younger audience? Or do you? Is it for the adult population?

Peter
If I have a specific event, as I’m planning the presence, I will keep in mind the audience. So I’m trying to think off the top of my head, just saying in general, I’ve been on Webb for five years now. And one of the initiatives that I’ve kind of bulked up, if you will, is Webb going to dark sky events at national parks. National parks around the country are in different locations, which is what we try to do. It’s doesn’t cost money to go for us. It’s, you know, another government entity, so it’s welcoming to us, and it gets a lot of people. So that’s where we’ll go and when I go to these events, I’m typically aiming towards elementary schoolers, so young kids, and then their family that’s there will also learn from it. And a lot of the times that’s what I aim the talking points at. We have really extensive talking points for all our missions that kind of cover every topic that could come up. So, in a media interview with a large network, you could have a complicated question and some of the talking points will cover that and all the way down to just top level. If you have 20 seconds to talk to an eight-year-old, what are you going to hit on? We try to share that information so people can be ready when they do their outreach, but the style of how you interact with somebody is kind of different for everybody. Like I said, I have a journalism background. So, I kind of just try to do like the lead of a story like who, what, when, where, why is what I try to tell people. But I schedule engineers and scientists to work the outreach as well. I always tell them like talk what you know. So, if you’re building this telescope, talk to a kid about what you’re working on? How do you build something for space? Make it something you’re passionate about.

Louis
Interesting. Sounds like you have engineers and scientists that help staff these. Could you tell me a little bit about maybe some of the materials that you bring to some of these programs?

Peter
We have kind of like the go to popular materials that we create. So it’s like, stickers like decals, what it’s called, like a sticker, a bookmark, a poster, and a lithograph. And most of these, most of these have information on the back of them. It’s like an eye-catching sticker. But on the back of it, it says, you know, Webb is a joint mission with 14 countries and 29 states. It teaches you something and then it gives you something you want to take home. Like if you just give someone an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, they might not want to keep it or show it off or tell their buddy about it. And each one of these products has different amounts of information. The litho is the one that’s like the deeper dive where it’s a sheet of paper with four paragraphs about the mission. So, if someone’s really interested, they can read and then at the bottom, it has our website, or social media just so they can keep diving deeper and deeper. So those are kind of like the usual suspects of materials to create for missions to share what they’re up to, why they matter, what their goals are. But a lot of times, we can get creative as well once we have kind of the basics handled.

Some of the cool things we’ve done with Webb, because Webb has been around and fully established, like we came up with paper models that we can share with people so they could print at home to make their own Webb. A lot of times Webb, it’s so big, it had to fold it into its rocket and then in space it deployed. So, the analogy, it’s like origami, so we worked with the origami master to make the primary mirror so you can fold it to make this primary mirror that looks pretty cool. You have to have a certain amount [talent]… I tried to make it. It doesn’t look as good as the origami masters. But it’s like if someone out there is really into origami, it’s kind of like the cool crossing of art and engineering and technology. We try to share our material to bring in new audiences, bringing new people that might not have normally or off the bat be interested in it. But then they see that connection. They’re like, oh, wow, I want to learn more about this.

Louis
Definitely. That sounds really effective. And like a perfect example of a way that an outreach initiative is successful. Can you discuss any upcoming projects or missions that you’re particularly excited to share with the public? Maybe, you know, JWST is at the one year, but Nancy Grace has yet to launch.

Peter
Yeah, so the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is sure, that’s 100%. That’s kind of the next big thing. So Webb is doing incredible work. I’m excited to introduce people to Roman. Most people I meet at events will just have not heard of Roman yet, which is fine. It’s hard. There’s like I said, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. At NASA. It’s hard to keep up with all the missions. But yeah, Roman is being built currently at Goddard. And it’s going to launch by May 2027. And it’s going to have a lot of similarities to Webb, but a lot of differences that will complement each other to further astrophysics and our understanding of the universe. So, it’ll be at the same orbit as Webb. So, it’s going to be a million miles away orbiting the Sun at L2 as the orbit is called. A similar wavelength. It’ll be near infrared, where Webb is near and mid infrared. So similar wavelength, same orbit. But where Webb and Hubble look at a very narrow field of view look very deep, Roman is going to have a field of view that’s between 100 to 200 times wider than Hubble and Webb. So, it’s gonna look very wide, and at the same resolution as Hubble, so it will be able to, to map the universe like we never had before, in a way that would take, you know, Hubble and Webb 1000s of years to take all those images and stick stitch them together. So, it’s a, you know, fisheye lens on the universe to learn more about dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets. Roman will help us see more rogue Earth’s than we ever would have been able to if we use ground-based observatories. Those are exoplanets that are more close to Earth size, so there might be chances to find some signs of life there.

Louis
That’s so cool. What advice would you give to someone interested in a career in science and engineering communications? Maybe particularly in space and astronomy?

Peter
Sure, I get this question a ton because it is rather an interesting job. I would say if they’re younger, to try anyway they can to get their foot in the door. So, it’d be an internship or talking to people in that career just to learn as much knowledge as they can, and then try to do it. So, the practical thing I always tell people is that if you’re looking for jobs, try and major in something that will help you get there. So, science, technology, but if you want to work in communications, journalism, communications, public relations, are all good ideas, and then taking internships throughout college. And then once you get out, you really have to look. This little tidbit I tell people is that a lot of the workforce at the federal government are contractors, so it’s not civil servants. It’s about like 30% 25% are civil servants, the rest are contractors. So, you have to kind of dig and find where the communications contracts are and apply and get your foot in the door and apply, apply, apply. It’s not a straight path. It’s not an easy quest. You just have to keep plugging away.

Louis
That’s great advice. What’s something surprising and unexpected that you’ve experienced as a public outreach lead?

Peter
I’ve definitely been surprised. The interest in space kind of goes beyond languages. So, like, I’ve had the chance to work events where it’s an international audience of kids and they don’t speak English, but they still enjoy. And they connect with the content, so much so that it is very surprising.

Like I connected with a classroom outside Venice, Italy. These kids were in first grade, so they’re still learning. They don’t really know much English. They all drew pictures about what Webb saw and they were learning in their school about Webb. And I just connected with the teacher. And as luck would have it, one of our scientists is Italian. He talked to them and just seeing the kids light up and hearing like, oh, this guy is like us who speaks Italian, he works on this incredible mission. It kind of like you could see the connections in their eyes like, oh, wow, this is something I could do. It’s not NASA is, you know, unattainable thing that no Italian has ever worked at. It’s like, no, I could do this if I really want to do it. So that was a recent one that just warmed my heart to see these kids just they sat there and they were really locked in. And they loved hearing about Webb in Italian. So that was a good one.

And a funny one that I’ll end on is you never know who you’ll meet at these conferences, like I assume, and it’s a good assumption that you’ll run into, like scientists, engineers at these science and engineering conferences. But one of my first events for Webb, I was at a Space Research Conference in Pasadena, California so just outside LA. And this guy walks up. I told my coworker, oh, that looks like Billy Zane, the guy from Titanic. And he walked up, and his dad said Billy Zane and I was like, oh, it is Billy Zane. I was just like, hey, like, what are you doing here?  He owns some small company and he’s interested in tech, and he lives in Pasadena. So, he’s like, oh, I saw it was here so I bought a badge and I came. Tell me about your mission. And he was just really interested in space stuff. He took us to lunch. We hung out with him for an afternoon. Yeah, it was just surprising connection that came out of nowhere.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

Also, we are getting ready to release a library exhibit to accompany this series. Any campus library can have access to our slides for display. Check out our website Longitude.site for more details soon.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Zehra Karakilic
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of scientists for helping us understand our universe better.

I am Zehra, a student at Tilburg University pursing a degree in neuroscience.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Jeyhan Kartaltepe from Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is an associate professor of Physics and Astronomy.

Jeyhan studies the distant universe, and she also conducts research on how galaxies first form and evolve over time using telescopes on the ground and in space. Furthermore, she is a leading member in several large collaborative multiwavelength surveys, including COSMOS.

Her COSMOS-Webb project team received one of the first grants to study the initial images from the James Webb Telescope, so I wanted to speak with her about her work and the unexpected findings she has encountered.

We started our conversation with her pathway to astronomy. Enjoy listening!

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Jeyhan Kartaltepe
I always liked astronomy, even when I was a little kid, because I partly liked the weird stuff. I always liked learning about space and I would ask my dad, you know, random questions about planets and other things. So, I think it was always fun for me and interesting and so far, removed from what we do and see, on a day to day basis. It seemed for me a natural direction to go in, to read and learn more about. So, it seemed natural to start to study in school. And then of course in school, you see the kinds of jobs that people around you do. They’re teaching classes and they are professors. And it seemed like that would be a fun job to do.

My work is all observational. So, it’s all done using data using telescopes. I’ve been involved with projects involving Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope and other telescopes. And so, JWST is kind of a natural extension. It’s something that the whole community has looked forward to for many, many years, and through its development and all the delays and just kind of the exciting next step in terms of having capabilities that we haven’t had before. And so being able to study things we haven’t been able to study before.

Zehra
I find it really fascinating to see what we can actually find out about the galaxy and about space, and that there’s actually just more than beyond our little world.

Jeyhan
Yeah. And it’s hard to believe we can learn about things that are so far away, or about the beginning of the universe. It sounds like science fiction, right? So, it’s one of the fun things to talk about, when teaching a class, like how do we actually learn about these things that are so far away that we can’t actually touch but what can we learn from their light?

Zehra
Could you maybe explain in a few sentences, the mechanism that makes up the telescope like the JWST?

Jeyhan
The most important part of a telescope is the mirror. So JWST has a large, about 6.5 meter in diameter mirror. It’s segmented. So, it was put together in pieces to make it easier to assemble, fold up and put on a spacecraft to launch so it’s a bit unusual that way. It also has a secondary mirror. So, there’s a big mirror, and then there’s a smaller mirror that, you know, the light reflects off the big mirror and then on the smaller mirror and then gets sent down to the cameras.

The other most important piece of a telescope is the cameras. You have to collect that light, somehow. The different cameras have different functions. They can collect data at different parts of the spectrum. JWST is optimized for the infrared part of the spectrum, but the infrared is a pretty wide range. And so, there’s instruments that are suited for the near infrared, so closer to the visible part of the spectrum that we see. And there’s others that are designed to work in the mid-infrared. And then there’s some that take images that just take pictures. And there’s others that take spectra.

Zehra
Yeah, so I also wanted to know a bit more how the whole infrared observing works.

Jeyhan
There’s a lot of reasons why the infrared is really important for astronomy, especially for what I do, it’s really important because our universe is expanding. So that means everything’s moving away from everything else. So, it has a motion. And anytime something moves, the light that it emits, is actually moved to a different part of the spectrum. So, for galaxies in the very distant universe, the light that they would emit in the visible part of the spectrum that we would see is actually moved all the way to the infrared. So, we need the infrared to be able to see their sort of normal, the invisible light that we see.

There’s also a lot of processes that emit in the infrared. One of the biggest is dust. Dust seems like it wouldn’t be important but it’s very important in space. Dust is particles in space that eventually form planets. And so, things like wanting to study planets or planet formation around stars, you need to be able to see that in the infrared dust in galaxies, regions that are forming new stars. You can see that in the infrared.

Zehra
That’s really interesting to hear about all of this. I wanted to ask also just generally, how this whole concept started with your project, and how long would you say it took to develop it?

Jeyhan
I guess there’s a long answer and a short answer. So, this project that we’re leading, it’s called COSMOS-Webb, it’s observing a portion of the sky, that’s known as the cosmos field. And it’s something that I’ve worked on this particular field of the sky for almost all of my career. I started in graduate school when the first Hubble data of this area was taken. And so, over the years, you know, people have taken more and more data, because ideally, you’d like to have data across the entire spectrum to study all kinds of different objects and all kinds of different physical processes. When there was a call for proposals for JWST this was kind of a natural extension, like, Hey, we should really have the infrared data here too, because that would be fabulous but it took a while to work on it. Because of COVID, everything got delayed, which in a way sort of helped because it gave us more time to work on the proposals, to kind of hash out what we wanted to do. We had meetings like this one on Zoom every week, where we kind of talked about different ideas and different strategies, and what could we do if we did it this way or that way. And so, it really did take a long time to flesh out what we wanted to do. I think we were, in a way, kind of lucky to have that extra time to put it all together.

Zehra
It sounds such a complex project, what does your work environment look like? Like with who do you work with? Other astronomers, or maybe engineers?

Jeyhan
We have collaborators that are all over the world. So, we’ve been using zoom for many years, before it even became popular. A lot of people based in Europe, a lot of people based in the US, quite a few in Japan. Those are kind of the main places, and that includes people like me, or faculty that includes students. There’s a lot of graduate students that are involved, that includes postdocs. So, it’s a pretty broad range of people but for the most part, all scientists.

Zehra
What would you say is a typical day at your work? Like, how would you describe it?

Jeyhan
I guess it depends. Generally, my time is kind of split between teaching, which is kind of 20 – 30% of my time, something like that. Doing other universities support work, being on committees, evaluating student applications, you know, those kinds of things. And then about half of my time is devoted to research, but my research is really split into my own research where we’re working on things and working with my students. And so, I have a group of students and postdocs here that all have their own projects. And so, a good chunk of my time is spent working with them and meeting with them and talking through things. And ideally, when I have some focus time, and it’s spent writing, or programming. Those are kind of the two sides of things, you know, analyzing the data, which involves us a lot of coding and making plots and things like that. And then writing. Either writing the papers or writing proposals to obtain other data or obtain funding, things like that. So, you know, 90% of my day is in front of the computer.

Zehra
Do you also have like a student team that’s like helping out with the project?

Jeyhan
Yeah, I have several students here working with me on different projects. A couple of them are working on the COSMOS data and I have a couple of postdocs as well that are working on it.

Zehra
It’s really nice. I think it’s so important as a student to gain some research experience, which is quite hard sometimes. Especially working on such a big project and I think it’s probably very valuable in general.

Jeyhan
And it’s, it’s perfect timing for students right now. Because this is all new and exciting. So, I think it’s potentially grabbing the interest of students that might do something else, but then they see this cool thing and like, Oh, I could work on that. So hopefully fun for them.

Zehra
Could you also speak about so when you look at the universe through like a space telescope, how is it different than, I don’t know, like the telescopes on Earth? How is it more advanced? Or what would you say are the main differences or the similarities maybe also?

Jeyhan
The big difference of going to space versus being on the ground is to not have the atmosphere in the way. So, Earth’s atmosphere causes a lot of problems for observing. I mean, we need it so it’s great that we have it, but you know, if it’s cloudy, it’s cloudy. You can’t do anything about that the light is blocked. The atmosphere is very turbulent, right. There’s always stuff moving around. So that impacts how well you can see things because it kind of bounces light, you know, through the atmosphere on its way to the detector. So, by going to space, you can have much more detailed images and much more sensitive images. So, you can look at things that are much fainter, that you couldn’t see otherwise. And it’s especially true in the infrared because our atmosphere emits a lot in the infrared. And so, it, kind of, can block out certain parts of the spectrum, just because it’s already really bright there. So, you can’t see things that are faint behind it. So that’s really the biggest thing. Of course, the negative is that it’s expensive to put anything in space. And it’s difficult. So, you know, putting a big telescope is just technologically challenging. To get everything, kind of like JWST had to fold up, you know, to fit in the spacecraft, whereas on the ground, you can build bigger things, and it’s a little bit easier.

The other thing about going to space is temperature. Things can be kept really, really cold, which is again, important for the infrared. Things that are warm, emit light in the infrared, right, that’s how like infrared goggles and stuff work by looking at heat. So, you need to be away from Earth’s heat source to be able to do much in the infrared.

Zehra
Could you also talk about the COSMOS-Webb survey and what your whole role there is or your position?

Jeyhan
I’m one of the PI’s. I have a collaborator, Caitlin Casey, who’s at UT Austin, who’s the other PI, so we’re leading the survey together and the goal of this survey is to cover a relatively large area of the sky.

So, there’s kind of two different ways people go about surveys of galaxies. You can either look at one part of the sky, just take like one image, but sit there for a really long time so that you can collect more and more light, like a really long exposure and look at really faint things. So, then you don’t cover a large area, that’s a small area, but you look really faint.

The other strategy is to not expose for as long, so not to look as faint, but then to kind of map out a larger area. So instead, you’re covering many more galaxies, but more of the brighter ones and less of the fainter ones. In reality, people do both. The COSMOS-Webb survey is sort of that wide area. So, it’s wider than any of the surveys that are going to be done. Which means the huge benefit of that is statistics in some way. So, we’re going to observe, you know, hundreds of 1000s of galaxies, rather than, you know, 10,000, or something like that, like other surveys might have. And that also allows us to study sort of large-scale effects, large scale environments. So, if it matters, you know, whether something is really isolated, or whether something lives in a really dense environment, it’s like comparing things that happen in cities versus things that happened out in the suburbs, or in the rural area, you need kind of like a wide map really to be able to, to cover everything to see how things change.

Zehra
So how do you determine, like, the specific focus with the area, like, which wide range of the galaxies to pick?

Jeyhan
The area we picked is an area of the sky that people have studied for a long time. So, we already had data from other telescopes. So, you already have information in other parts of the spectrum. That’s really useful. So, you don’t have to go back and try to collect that after the fact. We want to study areas that are relatively free of like nearby stars, and things that are gonna get in the way. There’s gonna be stars everywhere but there’s certain parts of the sky where all you see your stars and certain parts that are more empty. And so, you have to choose an area that’s a bit more empty. It’s also in a part of the sky that we can observe from the ground from both hemispheres. You know, there are some parts of the sky you only see from the north or only from the south, this field is kind of on the equator. So, you can see it from anywhere, which is good for using other telescopes.

Zehra
Could you talk about if you already have some findings, such as achieved with the COSMOS-Webb survey, or how you think this could improve our current knowledge about the previously done studies, maybe?

Jeyhan
So, the biggest thing that we are trying to do is study the very, very early universe. So, the most distant galaxies. We just got a big chunk of data at the end of April that we’re kind of analyzing right now. But we already have sort of candidate objects that are very distant. And so, we want to study not only how many of them there are and what their properties are, but how they’re spatially distributed. If they’re kind of grouped together, or if they’re more kind of spread out. And so that’s, I think, something unique we’ll be able to do, we’ll be able to have so many of them. The other thing, that’s a huge benefit there is that if anything is really rare, you know, like, it’s extremely bright. And there might only be, you know, one and a certain patch of the sky, we’re more likely to find those rare things, because we’re covering a large area.

Zehra
And also because it’s different from the previously done studies and like different telescopes?

Jeyhan
Right, exactly. So, we can see things that are much fainter, and therefore, much further away. We can also see things in more detail. So, you know, from Hubble, sort of the extreme things that were found that are very distant, they’re just tiny little smudges, you know, like, you can’t see any detail there. You just like, oh, there’s something there. It’s like a tiny dot. But now we can see structure. And that tells us more information about what’s happening in the galaxies.

Zehra
Like generally, with your whole work and research, have you encountered something that was really surprising or maybe unexpected?

Jeyhan
I guess there’s a few things that have been surprising. One is that so far, people have been finding more galaxies at these great distances than was expected. Like we all made predictions. Because we hadn’t seen them yet. And there’s theoretical predictions for what there might be. And so far, it seems like we’re seeing more things than people predicted, which is kind of fun, because that gives us more to work with. And it’s it was kind of unexpected. And now people are trying to figure out why that is. And so that kind of goes back to the theorists to figure out, you know, what is different about the universe, that there’s more things. So that’s been one surprise.

I guess another surprise, you know, from other surveys I’ve been working with is that there’s a lot of active black holes in these galaxies, like more and more of them than we might have. And maybe we should have known that, I don’t know. But to find so many of them, it’s been kind of exciting. So, it’s been an interesting thing that I think we weren’t really expecting to spend so much time on but it’s been popping up.

Zehra
What would you say is your expectation of the coming years when it comes to this field?

Jeyhan
We’re gonna learn so much. It’s still been less than a year since we started getting data. And there’s already been so much work, and so many papers, and so many discoveries. And it’s like, we only just scratching the surface. So, it’s going to be really exciting to see what comes out.

Zehra
Since you started working for JWST, what would you say was the most exciting thing that you were looking forward to in the beginning and what would you say is it now? Or how did that change their expectation, or your motivation also?

Jeyhan
I think we all kind of had an idea of what to expect based on simulations and what things would look like, but seeing the reality was just kind of mind blowing. Right? And the fact that everything worked. You know, just whenever you have such a big project, so many moving parts, so many things could go wrong, I think, of course, we all hoped nothing catastrophic would go wrong, but little things, little things can go wrong, like, oh, this particular thing doesn’t work, or oh, this instrument is not as sensitive as we thought it would be. But everything was so smooth and went so well. And that just almost never happened. So that was a huge shock.

Zehra
That was a lot of hard work and also good luck, I guess.

Jeyhan
Yeah. And, and because of the delays, the delays helped. Because you test something, it doesn’t work, you’re like, okay, we’re not gonna launch. Well, it doesn’t work, we need to keep testing and fix all the things. So that’s a good thing about the process, even though it made it take longer.

Zehra
So basically, there was like an extra six months to improve on the things and make it work better than I guess.

Jeyhan
And then of course, seeing the data was pretty amazing. Especially the spectra I think most people see images in pictures, and that I think people can relate to that. Spectra don’t mean anything to most people in the public. But, you know, for the scientists looking at spectra, that’s where you’re seeing, like the real physical information, and you can actually see your signatures of the different elements that you’re observing. And, and that’s really cool. And so, like when they did that big press event last summer, and they showed all the different things, they showed a spectrum of a galaxy, it was really far away. So, it’s just a bunch of lines. It probably looked really boring but that was the thing that kind of made me go, oh my God, that looks so cool. Because it’s still crazy to me that we can see that kind of detail at these at these crazy distances.

I think the biggest thing, to me is just the amount of awe and wonder about the universe that a telescope like this conveys. And I think that’s important for all of humanity, right? Even if you don’t know all the details about the science or how things work, just to see like the incredible wonders that are in our universe that we can actually learn about is like one of the biggest achievements of humanity, I think.

(music)

Zehra
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site. We would love to hear from you.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of people from various organizations that brought it to fruition. JWST or Webb, is a space observatory that is a million miles from earth, giving us a new look at the universe.

I am Louis Noel, a recent graduate of the master of engineering management and leadership program from Rice University.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Alison Nordt, director of space science and instrumentation at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

I was interested in the new innovations and the partnerships that made the Webb telescope a success.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Alison Nordt
There are four instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope. And since it’s an international project, some of those instruments are actually from the international partners. There are two from the European Space Agency and one from the Canadian Space Agency. And, and the one that I worked on called the Near Infrared Camera is the one US instrument. It’s also the primary Near Infrared Imager on the observatory, and kind of serves two purposes, not just as a science instrument, but it’s also serves as the wavefront sensor, which means it does the sensing for how the images are coming from the telescope and how they’re, for lack of a better term, how are they messed up? Because the James Webb Telescope has 18 segments in its primary mirror. So, there are 18 segments that are all adjustable on orbit, and you have to change the shape of them, and their position and orientations, to get it to act like a perfect mirror after it unfolds in space and then cools down to cryogenic temperatures. So that sensing of how to correct the primary mirror is all done was in NIRcam, so if NIRCam doesn’t work or if it didn’t work, it does now, but if it hadn’t worked, then the James Webb telescope would not have worked.

Louis
Yeah, that’s quite the mechanisms and actuation problem for all 18 segments moving. I remember that was a very pivotal part of the launch when it was in orbit and then had to adjust it to make sure we got everything in focus and working. Let’s step a bit down on the in terms of technical level just for this next question. Um, could you describe how an infrared camera is different than other cameras? And why that may be important to James Webb Space Telescope?

Alison
Oh, absolutely. Okay. So, the light that our eyes can see, it’s just in the visible spectrum. And that’s a very small portion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. That includes X-rays, and microwaves, and all of these different types of electromagnetic radiation. The infrared spectrum is just a bit longer than red. So, the ultraviolet is a bit shorter than blue. And the infrared is a bit longer than red. Everything at the observatory starts with the science. You know, why are we doing what we’re doing? Why are we looking in the infrared starts with the science?

The science goals for the Webb telescope are to look at the very first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. And these galaxies formed a long time ago, you know, approximately 13.7 billion years ago. So how do we look back in time like that? Well, the light takes a long time to get to us because the universe is expanding. And of course, we’ve learned over the last several decades that not only is it expanding, but it’s accelerating in its expansion, which means that the objects that are very far away from us are traveling away from us and accelerating in their speed. So, if we want to look back in time and see these very first galaxies, we’re looking a long time away at objects that are moving far away from us. Well, light is shifted similar to sound. When you hear a train go by, you know, you hear the Doppler effect, in motion where the train is at a higher pitch when it’s coming toward you and then a lower pitch is it’s going away from you. The same thing happens with light that happens with sound. So, if we’re looking at an object that’s coming toward us, it looks bluer than it actually is. And if you’re looking at an object that is moving away from you, is looks redder than it actually is. But if it’s moving really, really fast away from you, then the light can be shifted into a very different spectrum than it originally. So, these galaxies started with light that our eyes can see even blue light. And as it evolved over time, and is now moving so far away from us, that lights all been stretched out by the effective the speed of the light, and it stretched into the infrared. So, we need to look at these longer wavelengths that are stretched out. So that’s what drives the need for an infrared camera. And it enables us also to see within a nebula, the property of infrared light is that it can detect heat. And so, if we’re looking for how are stars galaxies born, there’s a big cloud like a nebula of gas and dust that the visible light can’t get through. But infrared light detects heat. It can see through that and see to the birthplace of the stars. What’s different about an infrared camera it can detect those longer wavelengths that the detectors are optimized to see infrared light as opposed to visible light, or even ultraviolet, there are certain detectors that can see ultraviolet light or see infrared light. But infrared light, again, is a detection of heat. So, if you’re building a telescope to detect heat, you have to make it really cold or the heat will blind it effectively. So, our instrument operates at 37 Kelvin, or 37 degrees above absolute zero. So that enables us to be very sensitive to the faint infrared light that’s coming from infant galaxies billions of years ago.

Louis
And that detection at such a low temperature, I understand that was partly what made that possible is the large sunshield. Is that correct? And was that something you worked on?

Alison
I did not work on that. There were many, many people who worked on all aspects of Webb. But yes, one of the unique features of Webb is that it is passively cooled. Most of it. There is one cryocooler, but I’ll talk about that in a minute. But most of the observatory is cooled down to a roughly 40 Kelvin, due to this giant sunshield this the size of a tennis court, and it has five layers in it. And they separate these layers so that there is a vacuum or a space between them. So you don’t get conduction through those layers. And they basically shield the light from the earth, the Sun and the Moon at the same time, which dictates where we are.  The Webb telescope is a million miles from Earth. And it’s away from the Sun in the opposite direction of the Sun at a unique orbital point called L2 or Lagrange point 2 where it can orbit this point, and use this giant sunshield to block the heat of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon. And so that allows the telescope to cool down to roughly 37 – 40 Kelvin and keep us very cold. So yes, that sunshield enables us to do that but that I did not work on that I just worked on the instrument, the camera. But there’s lots of people worked on all different aspects of Webb.

Louis
Speaking of which, it’s a very complex and large project spanning multiple countries and continents and organizations. Do you know how many people were involved in the JWST project? And maybe how many of those were from Lockheed Martin?

Alison
There’s been estimates that roughly 20,000 people have worked on Webb, which is a large number of people but it took a huge team to do that. At Lockheed Martin, there were about 130 to 150 people over the course of the time. We never had that many at one point working on it, but remember, we worked on it for quite a long time and supported it. We basically worked on it from the time we first proposed it until we delivered it was just over 10 years. The project started in 2002. It launched in 2021. So, a lot of that time was at higher levels of testing. We weren’t working on the camera for 20 years but there was a lot of different layers of testing. And so, some aspects of the program had to start earlier than others. But over that time, they had something like 20,000 people work on it. And these are people from all over the world. I mean, there’s people from Europe, from Canada, from the United States from even French Guiana where the rocket launched from, so several continents of people working on the telescope.

Louis
So cool. And was there ever a point in the project where they needed to put a lot more personnel on it? Like, you know, it wasn’t maybe like a team of, you know, 20 to 40 at Lockheed Martin then did it ever ramp up? Like a particularly, you know, critical moment, or one where you needed a lot of personnel?

Alison
Yeah, the most number of people that were working on, it was probably during testing of all of the components and starting integration. Because we had a lot of different assemblies that would have to come together to be put into the camera. NIRCam had over 130 optics, and each optic needed to be individually tested and then assembled with its next higher level of assembly and, and tested again and tested again, and make sure that everything works at every level. Again, everything has to be tested at cryogenic temperatures. So, it takes a lot of work to do that all the electronics boards were going through testing. You are trying to do a lot of testing in parallel. That’s what adds up to a lot of people to get that done.

Louis
I see, that’s very interesting. So, what was your approach to problems or maintaining motivation on this long-term project? And was that approach similar to that of your team members?

Alison
Well, yeah. I think that a lot of team members had a lot of motivation to get this done. What drove us was getting, you know, this mission accomplished. You know, the science in the end. But you know, there are some long days when things don’t go well. A lot of the things that we had to develop for NIRCam for Webb as a whole, were new. That hadn’t been done before, hadn’t been applied this way. So not just new technologies that had to be developed, but better ways of doing things that have never been done before. I mean, manufacturing of optics, for instance, you think, oh well, optics had been manufactured since Galileo was grinding lenses. For sure, but if you’re going to do them in orders of magnitude more precisely than has ever been done before, you have to develop new processes. You have to figure out ways to do this at 37 Kelvin. And then the end mission to accomplish this world class observatory that is better than any observatory has ever been built before. So that’s just motivation to work on such a great project that can change the fundamental understanding of the universe. That’s a lot of motivation.

Louis
Yeah, but when it boils down to it, that is quite an impactful sort of overarching mission. So, one question we always like to ask is, did you experience anything surprising that you did not expect while working on this project?

Alison
About every day! You know, you think, oh well, it’s the same but different, we’ll just do it again. And then it’s not. You know, there’s lots of challenges and you go into test, and you put something together the way that, you know, a textbook could tell you the best it could be done, and you find out that’s not good enough. And then you have to do an order of magnitude better. So yeah, sometimes things are surprising. And sometimes they surprise you in a good way. Even if you’re the only one that thinks that it can be done and accomplished, there is a lot of people are telling you it can’t. And then you sometimes get pleasantly surprised and go see, it worked the way I planned. Occasionally that happens. But you know, this is the process of invention and discoveries.

Louis
How did partnerships with NASA, ESA, and the CSA or other organizations influenced decision making and project timelines? And more broadly, I guess, what would what do you consider best practices for long term collaborations with multiple organizations?

Alison
Okay, yeah, a couple of different parts of that question. The instruments were individually split up into different contributions from different countries. So, they were separate. Until we all got together at the same time, at the end, when we delivered our instruments, what the European Space Agency was doing didn’t really affect what we were doing or what Canada was doing. We’re kind of working in parallel, so we were not affecting each other on a daily basis. There were some decisions made early by NASA that said, originally, we were going to have Canadian contributions inside of NIRCam, and we were going to work with the Europeans and the NASA management said, you know, I think that that’s a recipe for possible delays. Because we have a lot of restrictions in spaceflight. We were at that point, governed by the ITAR rules. And a lot has gone under the Department of Commerce now that the Department of State has rules on International Traffic and Arms Regulations. So, a lot of spaceflight hardware falls under those rules. And so it makes it a bit more challenging to share information internationally. And so, NASA decided that NIRCam would be an all US instrument, and that we wouldn’t have to get contributions from Canada or Europe, which, for better or for worse, it simplified interfaces but we didn’t. We kind of worked in parallel separately.

So as for best practices on a large mission like this, I think it’s, you know, check your egos at the door, and work for the mission together. You know, an example of this was when we when we got to finally put all of the instruments together into what’s called the integrated science instrument module. So, it’s the structure that holds all the science instruments, and now we’re, we are literally millimeters from each other when we put our instruments in, and there’s not a lot of extra space in there and put us all into one structure. And then we had to go to test that structure. Go to the vibration test. And it’s the first time that that the different teams were all in the same room. The test was executed at NASA. So we had the NASA team there that was executing the test, and we had the NIRCam team there from Lockheed, and the US team. And then we had the Europeans from the MIRI and NIRSpec teams. We had the Canadians there from for their instrument, FTS NIRISS. And we are all literally sitting shoulder to shoulder at different consoles watching the data coming in from those tests. And you’re looking at all of the different channels from the accelerometers that are all over the instruments. And of course, first you look at your own results, for your instrument, but then you’ve got access to everybody else’s results. And so, you are kind of cross checking each other and, and if anybody had any sort of anomaly, we were all kind of rolling up our sleeves and getting together. There wasn’t any finger pointing. There wasn’t any “Hahaha, we’re done and we’re gonna go out to eat, you guys solve your problem and stay till midnight.” Everybody was working together in that environment. And that kind of collaboration, I think is essential for a project like this. We saw it at different levels of testing. You know, it’s really refreshing environment to be in.

Louis
Yeah, that’s really fun you know. Sometimes you have to compartmentalize when dealing with things like ITAR but it engineering really shines, I think when you get in that teamwork setting, and you get to collaborate and build something amazing, which you clearly have done. How do you think James Webb Space Telescope is changing the way we see the universe?

Alison
Have you looked at any of the pictures yet? Take a look at some of the images and the descriptions of them. And some of them are absolutely gorgeous. And some of them may just be a smudge of light and yet we learn more from that smudge of light than you could ever imagine. What’s been most exciting is seeing really the deep fields looking at the very early galaxies. And I was talking to one of the scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute last week, and she’s looking at galaxies, and looking at very, very old galaxies and trying to compare them to newer galaxies and seeing if you can understand what’s going on in in a very old galaxy, by comparing it to something maybe a little bit closer and you get more light from and understand better, but making the Galaxy comparisons of what was a galaxy looking like that was formed, you know, 13.5 billion years ago. And one of the big shocks that came out recently was that some of those very early galaxies are extremely massive, and very mature. And that wasn’t the hypothesis. The hypothesis was that those galaxies would be much smaller than maybe short lived, they wouldn’t look like this. Why? We don’t know. You know, I’m now relying on the scientists and the astrophysicist to tell me what they’re learning from these pictures but they’re gonna fundamentally change what we know about the evolution of the universe, which I think is mind blowing. And it’s, it’s answering the questions of, you know, what makes us human.

As an advanced society to really ask and probe science questions to understand our world or universe or nature, we’re really fundamentally changing human knowledge for the future. Go fast forward 500 years, and what are the people 500 years from now going to think about what happened in the year, you know, 2020, or, you know, 2000s. I think that what we’re learning with Webb will be as profound as anything that is going on anywhere in our world right now. And I think it will be remembered and looked back as a great accomplishment, even 500 years from now.

Louis
I agree, it really is remarkable. And I think the work that you and many other people have been putting into this is really given a lot of hope and inspiration for a lot of people out there, you know, looking up to the stars, like there’s more to see. And there’s certainly a lot more science to be done. So we’re looking forward to it. Are you working on anything fun right now that you’re excited about?

Alison
Absolutely. I mean, Webb was fantastic to build and now the scientists are getting their time to use it, but I think what’s really exciting now is what’s next. And we’re working on formulating the Habitable Worlds Observatory. And if I look, you know, over the past 30 years, we’ve discovered all of these exoplanets, but the ones that we’ve been able to see are very large planets, Jupiter size or greater, large distances from their central star. And their central star is usually not as bright. We’re trying to build an observatory that can observe an Earth like planet around a sunlight star at about a one au kind of distance and get it spectrum and see what kind of characterize those planets. I mean, if you go back in human history, how many times have people looked up even a caveman and wondered whether there’s another world like ours out there, and we’ve never seen it and within our lifetime we might be able to. And so, we’re working on those technologies right now. And that’s what’s really exciting.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Ali Kazmaz
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of organizations and the people.

I am Ali Kazmaz, a student at Rice University pursuing a degree in architecture.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Mei-Li Hey from Northrop Grumman.

Mei-Li is a mechanical design engineer who worked on the James Webb project. I wanted to speak to her about her role as a test engineer intern when she first started at Northrop Grumman and how this led to her working on the project full-time, and also to understand the collaborations of different engineers that brought their projects to fruition.

We began our conversation with her telling us about the internship first. Enjoy listening!

(music)

Mei-Li Hey
I started as an intern the summer of 2016. I didn’t know what role I was going to play, let alone the program. I think I really lucked out with getting put on James Webb. Test engineers, they’re in charge of reading the drawings, and then writing procedures that will help the technicians who are the ones actually performing the work in, you know, exactly how they’re going to do it. I mean, these procedures, say down to like, take this nut, and this bolt and this washer, put them together to attach these two pieces, right? So, test engineers write those directions.

Ali
Sort of like Lego prescriptions. Very specific.

Mei-Li
Yes, exactly. Right. Test engineers are the ones who are doing the authoring. So, they do a lot of technical writing. And I thought that was cool. But as I was doing it, I liked the drawings. When I was reading the drawings, I was like, who’s making these drawings, because that seems like fun. They’re the ones who actually have some freedom, and they have some, you know, creative outlet, I guess, and how they’re going to design this whole thing. I was able to meet one of the managers of the mechanical design engineers, said, Hey, I’m a test engineer. But I would love to learn a little bit more about your group. And he was the manager of mechanical ground systems engineering. So, I spent the last maybe couple of weeks at my internship, learning just a little bit about that. And so, then when I got hired full-time, they knew that I liked the design aspect better so they put me straight into design engineering, where then I had a whole another world to learn. And it takes a little bit longer to learn that design part, but I like it a lot better.

Ali
When you were an intern, they were working on the Webb, and when you got hired, they were still working on the Webb, right?

Mei-Li
Yeah, absolutely. So, Webb was a very long program. We started, by we, I would say the company started proposing Webb in 1996. And my company officially won Webb in 2001. The original launch date was 2011. And we were exactly 10 years late. We doubled schedule. So, I did not join until like I said, 2016 was my internship. And then 2017 is when I started full-time. And so, I was on the program full time for the last 25% of the program, only. There were a few people on the program that had been there for the entirety of their career, they’d been there for 25 years, working on just this program. But for the most part, people’s lives change, and you have people cycle through I think, on average, this program’s retention was much better than most because it was a very exciting program. I joined at the very tail end.

Ali
You said, you were very interested in the creative process and how they were actually making the drawings instead of like the assembly of them. Could you maybe talk about how you merge this creativity, science and engineering?

Mei-Li
Sure, yeah. I think that design engineering is really the best way to do that. You do need to lean on creative skills, but you also need to have very strong quantitative skills to do the engineering portion of it. But I guess another unique part of joining the program when I did was that at this point, we were pretty much only addressing things that had gone wrong. So unplanned events. Like we had lots of parts that didn’t fit or things that broke, and we needed to go fix and they weren’t in the plan to go do these things. So, you needed to come up with pretty creative solutions. I mean, like one example is the bus of the James Webb.

There’s three main sub-assemblies for the Webb. And you mentioned one of them. It’s the sunshield. I feel like that’s the most iconic, just because it’s giant and shiny, and there’s nothing like it. And then of course, there’s the telescope part, which is the shiny gold mirrored telescope. And then under the sunshield on the other side of the sunshield is the least exciting subsystems called the bus and it’s just the big box that has all of the electrical components inside it. It’s really what runs the entire telescope is this big box. It’s called the bus.

There’s a ton of electrical components inside and one of them broke very late in the game. And we had to basically pull off the panels of the bus, taking apart the cube. So, taking up off one side of the cube, and going in there to try and fix the electrical component that broke. But obviously, none of that work is planned. So, figuring out how you’re going to take apart something that was never meant to be taken apart, and then put it back together, it takes a whole lot of creativity and equipment. And we needed to end up making a slew of pieces of equipment to take off this panel. And like access is really small. So, we had to make specialized tools that’s going to go in and reach and just fix this little component, come out and like thread the needle through these things, right. So that’s where creativity comes in. Because you have to think outside of the box. The only solutions that are going to work are going to be ones that are outside the box. But I mean, luckily, it’s not just you, it’s going to be you along with a bunch of other engineers, and you will stand on the floor and look at the problem. You have to come up with a solution, or plans.

Ali
How does that collaborative process work, like when working with a bunch of people that have different ideas of how to solve this, you know, how does that work?

Mei-Li
Yeah, it’s sometimes difficult, and especially in those very, very tense moments, it can get heated because like something just broke. So, tensions are already high. I think that what was very cool about the James Webb is that everybody who was working on it, we all had a shared mission, we want to get this thing off the ground. And I think that, you know, that is a very united feeling. Everybody’s doing what they’re doing or saying what they’re saying, because they have the same goal in mind. So, kind of have to keep that in mind if you start disagreeing on something. But the engineering process helps a lot, if you follow it.

You have systems engineers that will help you define requirements. Requirements are a very big deal. And, you know, if you say, well, this electrical component broke, you’ll have somebody that says, well, like, what do you mean, it broke? Like, what doesn’t work about it? And you have to then go to the requirements about what working means, is it meeting a certain threshold and meeting a certain requirement? So similar if like, okay, it breaks, it’s not meeting a certain requirement so how do you go and fix that requirement? And so, some people might offer a solution? You know, I might have an idea and say, well, I think, you know, I think we should rip apart the bus and take off this part and replace it with a brand-new part. Somebody else might say, well, okay, we don’t need a new part. We just need to fix this one piece, and then it meets the requirements again. Okay, well, technically, they’re right. As long as the requirements are met, you move on.

I think like the process to come to a solution is defining your requirements, brainstorming ideas, and then choosing the path of least resistance. Those are the three steps, I would say. And then everybody understands that that’s the engineering process. So, there could be debate about details and everything, but you define your requirements, you brainstorm ideas, and then you choose the path of least resistance.

Ali
And those three things that you said, are all engineers on the team, focusing on all three aspects, or I think you’ve said, some of them focus on defining the criteria, and some of them focus on solving problems, right.

Mei-Li
They’re all involved. You need many different disciplines to be involved in this decision-making process but each one has their responsibility or their expertise I should say. Like systems engineers, they’re experts in requirements definition. So, they’ll be giving a lot of input when we’re defining requirements. And then when we’re brainstorming solutions, design engineers are the ones who are really good at that. Their expertise is design. So, as we’re brainstorming or roughly designing different solutions, they’re heavily involved, but of course, they can only do that with the input of a test engineer who understands in depth, what the procedure is going to look like. Because I’ve made a made a wonderful tool that’s really really cool, you know, robot arm that’s going to go in and grab the piece, but the test engineer is the one with the information like, well, no, because we need to do steps A, B and C first. They’re more looking at it and like its sequential order and your robot arm won’t fit. Because C hasn’t been done yet when you’re trying to use the arm. So, like, I don’t think that any of these problems could be solved with just one discipline. It’s a collaborative effort, certainly. And I think, depending on what the problem is, and what phase you’re at, there’s going to be people who are, you know, have more responsibility to get things moving or less, but it’s, you know, it’s only going to occur successfully if you have participation of all disciplines there.

Ali
So, did you sort of figure out that you wanted to be more on the design side, as you were interning or did you have sort of an idea before that as well, that you’re wanting to be more on the design side of engineering?

Mei-Li
I think I had a little bit of an idea before, but being a test engineer, and then seeing what design engineers actually did verified it, for sure. So yeah, I mean, when I was in high school, I loved art. And I was a sculptor. And if I didn’t go into engineering, in college, I was gonna go into fine arts. So, I knew I really liked the artistic side of, you know, I had a, I like exercising the creative part of my brain as well. And so, a lot of what I focused on in college had to do with design, engineering, also. And I liked that. It’s a very good bridge for somebody who enjoys being creative, and especially sculpting you know, that I love ceramics. And that was my outlet in high school and in college. And so, design engineering is like computer animated sculpting. A lot of the times you’re just using software to help you make something instead of clay.

Ali
Could we talk about why the sunshield was essential for the James Webb telescope? And were you involved more in the sunshield design or more in the bus? And solving that problem that you described with the bus?

Mei-Li
Yeah, so even within design engineering, there are different types. So, the design of the sunshield was done by flight design engineers. They are experts in designing the parts that go to space. I was a mechanical grounds systems designer. When something needed to be tested, or integrated, or even something goes wrong, and they need special tools, you know, robot arms or whatever, you know, to fix the problem. That’s what I designed. So I’m not designing the stuff that actually goes to space. I’m designing all like a slew of equipment that’s needed in the integration and test. So, like, in terms of the sun shield, I had heavy involvement, but not from like designing, you know, the design of the sun shield happened in the early 2000s. So, I was like, 10, you know,

Ali
Has this technology evolved from then, or don’t they change anything since 2000?

Mei-Li
That’s a really good point. And that was like an electrical problem that I mentioned earlier. That happened because of software obsolescence. Because, you know, we were 10 years late in launching. So the parts that were in there were good, but it had been a long time. And so, you know, the, yes, we designed something that’s the first of its kind, and it’s brand new, but it’s not really brand new, it’s 20 years old, at the rate in which technology changes. The design of the sunshield was still, you know, was done 20 years ago, but nobody’s ever done anything like it, so it was still brand new, and the first of its kind.

When I joined, they had just finished putting it together. They had just finished, like actually fabricating it and so now it was time to test. There was a ton of mechanical ground systems, pieces that went into the testing of it. So, when we’re testing the sunshield to be able to operate in space, obviously, we want it to operate in zero G, but here there’s gravity. So how are we going to do that to make sure it works? Well, we have to design a slew of zero gravity simulators and weight off-loaders, things like that. And that’s what my team designed. So, I designed one zero gravity simulator for the deployment of the telescope upwards. Like there’s one point and the deployment sequence if you like, I know that there’s a YouTube video online where you can watch the entire James Webb. First it comes down, right and then the sunshield spreads out. And then, at one point that telescope starts moving upwards into its final position. That test, we needed it to like create a zero gravity simulator to offload the weight of the telescope. And that thing on top, I helped design. So, that’s an example of the sort of work that we do.

But if you’re interested in like the design of flight hardware, the stuff that actually goes to space, that’s a whole another design position. They have different sets of requirements. Their process to design, something that goes to space is much more rigorous, because it’s going to space, it’s less rapid. A lot of the designs I do are very rapid. And the design flight design engineers, it’s as much it’s a slower process, because they have to be very meticulous, you know, every single design decision.

Ali
What’s the new project that you guys are working on?

Mei-Li
There’s so much going on at Northrop all the time, but I am manager of cryocooler manufacturing. Basically, what it is, is just it works the same way a refrigerator does, fancy space refrigerator. And the point of having a cryocooler is to cool down all of the electronic components. James Webb has the most sophisticated cryocooler ever made. It really is an impressive piece of technology. What it does is it keeps all of the electronic components very, very cold so that if you have anything like Infrared, or X rays, or anything that’s trying to pick up light waves, you need to be able to keep everything very cold so that the sensors and the cameras on the telescope that read heat, or light can pick up, you know, the faint signals of those.

We fabricate cryocoolers here and then we include them in some of our own vertical integration. We also sell them to other companies like Lockheed and Raytheon. Other companies who also make satellites and might need a cryocooler.

Ali
How does the technology benefit the Webb and all these satellites?

Mei-Li
It makes the infrared and X ray possible. So, since Webb is an infrared telescope, without the cryocooler, these images wouldn’t be possible. What would happen is the electronics would be too hot and then that would mean that the infrared pictures that the telescope is taking, it wouldn’t be able to take those. Instead, it would just be muddled by the heat signatures coming from the electronic components.

Ali
How would you describe the infrared technology? What’s the advantage that it offers, compared to what they have on the Hubble?

Mei-Li
Sure, yeah. Visible light is what the Hubble takes pictures of. When you just take a picture of visible light, you can only see what is there right now, whereas infrared light, I mean, think of it like heat graph. You might have seen like in movies, sometimes when they have like cops that are looking into rooms, but you can see through doors, because you’re looking for a heat signature sort of thing. And it’s basically like the Webb has a camera so we can see through clouds. We can see through dust. We can see through rocks, meteors. We can see through all of that to see the infrared that’s many, many, many, many more miles away. Similarly, if I if I put my hand down on my desk here, and then I pick up my hand, if I looked at that spot on my desk with an infrared light, my handprint would still be there, right? Because heat has transferred from my hand to the desk. So visible light, it would just be a blank spot on my desk, but infrared light, it would say Oh, well, like there’s a hand that was here, right? Because there’s heat there. That was transferred from my hands to the desk.

Similarly, what we think happened with the Big Bang, and the first light is that those stars, galaxies, they don’t exist anymore. What happened with the Big Bang, that doesn’t exist anymore. But if we point the Webb towards that place where that did happen, there should be a heat signature from when it occurred because it was an event of universal size, right? So, like the biggest heat signature ever. And so there should be some remnants of that. So, the James Webb’s, part of its mission was to see if we see what we expect to see, to prove that the Big Bang actually did happen. If we don’t see that the heat signature that we expect to see, then maybe something else happened. We have found some images that suggest that that the Big Bang happened far before when we thought it happened. The universe is a lot older than we think it is. And so, I don’t think anything officially has been released yet like no new theories, but it’s not what we expected.

(music)

Ali
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Keegan Leibrock
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope, our conversations aim to shed light on the contributions of people from various organizations that brought it to fruition.

I am Keegan Leibrock, a student at Rice University pursing degrees in economics and political science.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Matthew Greenhouse, an infrared astronomer from NASA. He has been working on the Webb telescope since 1997.

Prior to 1997, Dr. Greenhouse worked for the Smithsonian as an astrophysicist. We began our conversation about his work there and what it was like transitioning into working at NASA.

Please enjoy listening!

(music)

Matthew Greenhouse
I’ll give you a little bit of my background. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson. My undergraduate degree was in geology. I became a geologist. And then I decided that I wanted to go into planetary geology and then shortly after that, I decided I wanted to just go into astrophysics. And so, I went off to the University of Wyoming to get my PhD in astrophysics. I went to Wyoming because at the time, they had just built what was the world’s largest infrared telescope. They needed people to help build instrumentation and things like that. So, I thought it was a good place for me to go, and it turned out to be.

The first job that one gets after getting a PhD, it’s called a postdoctoral fellowship, or postdoc. And I did my postdoc at Smithsonian in Washington, where the primary project that I worked on was a European Space Agency project called the Infrared Space Observatory. Then, in 1996, I moved to Goddard Space Flight Center, because I’m the kind of astronomer that builds things and Goddard was just a better venue or place to be for building things than Smithsonian. In 1997, I joined the Webb mission, and I’ve been on that mission, ever since. It’s turned out to be my whole career.

Keegan
Honing in on the Webb Space Telescope, what sort of discoveries have been made using this new telescope? To me, it seems like new discoveries are being made every day, the capabilities are obviously immense. So, like, what is the processing like for these new discoveries?

Matthew
Well, Webb mission is just getting started. We’re a little over a year into the science mission. But as you say, every other day, there’s a there’s a discovery with the Webb. The Webb is giving humanity its first high-definition view of the infrared universe. So, it’s not a surprise that we’re having so many discoveries so quickly.  Much of it comes from the Webb’s ability to see fine detail like the Hubble Space Telescope does, and the Webb’s ability to detect incredibly faint light from the early universe and do all this in the infrared part of the spectrum. So, the Webb is showing us our first look at the first galaxies. A lot of surprises there. It’s enabling us to measure the chemistry in exoplanet atmospheres and all kinds of objects, revealing some phenomena that have never been seen before. It’s very exciting.

One of the things that seem unique about the Webb mission that we haven’t seen in the past, is the extent to which all the exciting results from the Webb, show up on social media and are all over the world within days, if not hours. So, the Webb is I think the first mission of its kind to fly in the era of social media. And so, it’s enabling all of humanity, really, not just not just the people in the US and Europe to share in the excitement of the web mission. I think it’s wonderful.

Keegan
And with that, can you explain how the Webb Space Telescope is sort of different from past telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s like the infrared capabilities and like being able to see new things that were previously not available.

Matthew
Sure. The Webb is designed to operate in the infrared part of the spectrum and that is what is most different about it from some of our other observatories. Hubble operates in the ultraviolet, visible part of the spectrum. Chandra operates in the X-ray part of the spectrum. One observes different phenomenon in these different parts of the spectrum.

Everything we know about the universe outside our solar system comes to us transmitted in starlight. What modern astronomers do primarily is extract physics information from starlight. And so, to get all the information about the universe, we need all the star light. And so that requires that we put telescopes in space because much of the light is blocked by our atmosphere. And it also requires that we build a number of different observatories that can operate concurrently with each one focused on a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum of light. Because one needs different types of equipment and methods to observe in different parts of the spectrum. So, we require several different observatories.

We built the Webb as an infrared telescope, in order to see the light from the very first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. Galaxies emit most of their light in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. But as that light travels to us, through the expanding space of the universe, for these primeval galaxies, the wavelength of the light is stretched into the infrared by the expansion of space. So, to observe it today, we have to build an infrared telescope. And that comes with all kinds of technical problems and unique challenges but it’s one of the things that sets the Webb most apart from, say, the Hubble. The Hubble cannot see the first galaxies, because it doesn’t have sufficient infrared capability. Also, its primary mirror is too small to be able to detect the faint light from those first galaxies.

Keegan
What is the role of NASA and sort of coordinating different partnerships with other organizations as well as like funding for Webb Space Telescope projects?

Matthew
Well, the Webb project was much too large a project for NASA to do by itself. So, it was a partnership with the European Space Agency and also the Canadian Space Agency. You know, we had to invite those agencies to be partners, and then we had to negotiate those partnerships.

Keegan
And with that, what sort of ongoing projects are there currently, regarding the telescope? And I was also curious, like how use of the telescope may be divided, because I’m sure a lot of different astronomers want to use it.

Matthew
How does it all work? Well, once a year, NASA solicits observing proposals. Proposals on where to point the telescope, from the worldwide astronomical community. Not anyone can submit such a proposal. Then the proposals are peer reviewed. They’re reviewed by other astronomers in a double-blind fashion. Then a subset of all those proposals are selected to be uploaded to the Webb telescope. That’s how it works. So, after each one of those proposal cycles, we have about a year’s worth of observing projects queued up.

Keegan
So is that a pretty competitive procedure? Are there people who maybe don’t get to go through their projects for some time?

Matthew
Yeah, it’s an enormously competitive procedure. Each proposal is typically authored by a large team of astronomers. It’s very competitive but it’s also very fair. The double-blind aspect makes it possible for very young astronomers and basically anyone with a good idea to get that idea evaluated on a level playing field.

Keegan
Awesome, and what does your day-to-day work look like with regard to the Webb Space Telescope and other NASA projects? I’m sure you have all sorts of things going on.

Matthew
Right now, my focus is actually on missions that are in development now that haven’t flown yet. So, my Webb work is basically finished. It’s up and flying and working great. So, we have occasional anomaly resolutions and things like that but my focus is on very much on what comes next in the infrared.

Keegan
Yeah, and building on infrared I know you discussed this earlier but what specifically can the Webb telescope offer into the origins of life into the universe that previous telescopes couldn’t? I know you said, they can see further into the origins?

Matthew
Yeah, when I was a graduate student, there were no planets known outside our solar system. Today, we’ve identified more than five thousand, with the implication that all stars have planets. I mean, most astronomers would agree that all stars have planets with very few exceptions. And that gives us the implication that there are billions of habitable worlds in our galaxy. We don’t know that they’re inhabited but we know that they’re habitable. And we have learned how to search for life on them by studying the chemistry of their atmospheres. With missions like the Webb and even Hubble, we have developed techniques for doing spectroscopy on exoplanet atmospheres. Spectroscopy is a process by which we spread light out into its component colors, with special optics to allow us to see the emission and absorption of light by individual atoms and molecules in the atmospheres of these exoplanets. And what we’re looking for is chemistry that would be indicative of life. Chemistry that would be hard to explain with a biotic processes alone. And this is really just getting underway at NASA. The search for life is no longer a stuff of science fiction, it is very much a major objective of NASA Space Science. And we’re well into it now. So, the Webb will be the first major strategic mission to really work on this hard, and many more will follow.

Keegan
Sure, and with that, how do you think how else do you think the telescope will continue to shape the field of astronomy moving forward?

Matthew
It’s raising lots of questions about how galaxies form and evolve. It’s going to show us star formation in our own galaxy in detail that we’ve never seen before. It’s shown us unusual phenomena that we’ve never seen before. We have seen how, in one particular example, a late type star is seen to periodically emit pulses of dust formation that have produced an incredible display of a concentric rings of emission around the star. The Webb is just a fantastic machine, one that we’ve never had anything like it before. Whenever we take an image with the Webb, the background of the image is in effect, a deep field image like the Hubble deep field image. So the data is just incredibly rich. The system’s working perfectly. And we’re all very excited. And it should be just continuous excitement for as long as the Webb lasts.

Keegan
How long is the lifecycle typically of a telescope like this? Obviously, there has never been one like the Webb Space Telescope, but do you anticipate that 20 years down the line, maybe 30 years, there’ll be an even bigger telescope developed?

Matthew
Well, there definitely will be. The formal engineering life of the Webb is five years. But the consumables on board are, we have apparently 20 years of fuel. And that doesn’t mean the Webb will last 20 years, but it can last that long. If it doesn’t last that long, it won’t be due to lack of propellant. So, we’ll have to wait and see. Hubble of course, has lasted way, way, way beyond this design life, but by virtue of servicing. The Webb cannot be serviced the way Hubble was. The astronauts can’t go to the Sun-Earth L2 point where the Webb resides. We built lots and lots of redundancy into the Webb adjustability and we’ve designed it for graceful degradation. So, we’re very optimistic that it’s going to last a long, long time.

Now, the successor mission to the Webb, the one that NASA will launch right after it, in 2027, is called the Roman Space Telescope. It’s a completely different machine that’s designed primarily to study dark energy. But one of the things on board the Roman Space Telescope is a technology development instrument that will prove out the technology that we need to observe Earth like exoplanets. And ahead of the true successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is something called the Habitable Worlds Observer, the National Academy of Sciences last year gave NASA permission to go off and work on this Habitable Worlds Observer mission as their highest priority for the next mission, and it will be an optical UV telescope, like Hubble, only of size similar to the Webb. That’ll be the next thing up after the Romans Space Telescope, in the very large category of things. It should really, really be able to make a way on exoplanets as small as the Earth and really extend the Hubble UV optical science into the future.

Keegan
So are these projects deep into development? Are they being made? Are they in the approval process?

Matthew
Well, on the Roman Space Telescope is close to launch. So, it’s very much being built now. The Habitable Worlds Observatory is just starting in the planning process, and it will launch most likely toward the end of the 2030s.

Keegan
And as one final question, what advice you would have for those students seeking a career in astrophysics or related fields?

Matthew
Oh, well, that’s easy. If you want to work, well, first of all, the people that work in this field come from all walks of life, from all backgrounds. And a great way to… to work in this field, go to college, study whatever you love. But if that happens to include science, engineering, and math, then working in this aspect of aerospace is a very, very realistic career objective. You don’t need to be anyone special. You don’t have to have any special genius. You just need to be willing to work hard and be enthusiastic about it. And one way to test the waters is to do an internship at NASA. NASA has internships for every level from a high school to senior faculty. And if you’d like to work on data from missions like the Webb, but you don’t want to become a scientist, you can do that, too. NASA has a program called Citizen Science. And if you go to the Citizen Science website, there are all kinds of projects that you can get involved with just by being an interested person. And that’s another way to sort of see what it’s like and rub elbows with the folks who do this for a living.

(music)

Keegan
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.