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!

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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.

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

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