Webb Space Telescope: The Global Village

01I was fortunate enough to see the telescope completed in the clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center.

02And at that moment, it kind of hits you.

03You've been working on your little thing, you know, and you say, well, you know, it's part of a big, big mission.

04And then you see it and it's magnificent and it's huge.

05And you are there and you know you've been part of it.

06I'm getting even emotional thinking about it, but it is so incredible to know that your little tiny bit has been contributing to making that big, huge observatory coming together.

07It's such a large team of committed, dedicated individuals who have worked tirelessly for years through the pandemic and through all the difficulties to make it happen.

08And it hits you when you see it.

09Because it's really fantastic.

10This is NASA's Curious Universe.

11Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

12I'm Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

13The James Webb Space Telescope will be the biggest and most complex science telescope to ever fly in space.

14In the previous episodes of this mini-series, we've talked about the amazing science that Webb will do, and the innovative engineering that helps make it so powerful for space exploration.

15Putting together something this big and ambitious takes a lot of people.

16Teams of dedicated people around the world with many different skills and backgrounds.

17So let's meet a few people helping to make this mission happen.

18So thousands of people have participated to Webb.

19Every single component matters.

20Every single screw, every single detail is a key part of the success of this mission.

21That's Antonella Nota, the project scientist for Webb for the European Space Agency, or ESA.

22I work out of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where we have a contingence of ESA-funded personnel in support of the mission.

23Along with the Canadian Space Agency, ESA is a space agency partner in the Webb mission.

24The European Space Agency has contributed not only people, but two instruments.

25And of course, this extraordinary observatory will be launched on a European rocket, the Ariane 5.

26Europe is very, very committed and interested in this exciting mission, and we're just looking forward to see finally the liftoff.

27Antonella was born in Venice, Italy, and has been with the Space Telescope Science Institute since 1986.

28Her role with ESA began about 10 years ago.

29So my day starts very early because I'm dealing with Europe a lot, so I have to account for the six-hour difference.

30But as a project scientist, my job is really to make sure that the community, that the scientific community in Europe is engaged and informed about what's happening with Webb, about science, about what's coming.

31And my job is also to ensure that the public is fully informed.

32Antonella herself is part of an observing program that will look at a cluster of baby stars in the small Magellanic Cloud, a small, bright galaxy in the same neighborhood as our Milky Way.

33These stars are surrounded by gas and dust, but Webb's infrared vision can cut right through all that fog to see them.

34We look at them in the first two or three million years.

35That for star cluster is like the equivalent of a first year of life for a human.

36And we see what they do because the way they form and the way they grow will tell us what they will do when they are adults, when they are full-fledged stars.

37And we think that Webb will really unveil that process completely because we really do not know how stars form.

38Because Webb is able to see through the dust, will reveal, you know, those first stages.

39Building, integrating and testing Webb took the efforts of thousands of people across 14 countries, 29 U.S.

40states and Washington, D.C.

41They represent the participation of around 300 distinct companies, agencies and universities.

42Having those different partners contribute expertise is crucial to the mission's success.

43It is fundamental because no agency can do it all alone.

44And especially if you want to do the biggest thing, you have to work at it together.

45That's what diversity in science and engineering is all about.

46Not only you have additional resources, but you have also the different perspectives, the different cultural contributions.

47One community is specialized in building imaging devices.

48Another might be more specialized in building spectrographs.

49And you put them all together and you say, my big goal is I want to see the first 400 million years in the history of this universe.

50And I need to design something that allows me to see it.

51We have seen in science that international teams are the norm.

52And the language of science overcomes the national barrier, overcomes the difference in the individual national languages.

53So it's also, I think it's good for humanity.

54It helps everybody grow and it makes a much better and ambitious project at the end.

55On launch day, Antonella won't be at the spaceport in Karoo, French Guiana, where Webb will take off from.

56Instead, she'll be in Baltimore, monitoring the first signals of how the telescope is doing in space.

57But liftoff will still be very special for her.

58You know, you start thinking about all the things that can go wrong, which won't, because people have spent incredible amount of time making sure that everything is absolutely planned to the last second, to the minimum details.

59Some people have built their careers on this telescope.

60You watch this thing lifting off.

61It's just saying goodbye to your baby.

62At that point, I will have shivers down my spine.

63Another important part of the Webb story are the engineers who made sure the telescope's detectors are cold enough to make sensitive measurements that no one has ever done in space before.

64Temperature control is an essential part of designing a spacecraft, but it doesn't necessarily translate to home refrigerators.

65No, I stay away from my own.

66You mean the one in my kitchen.

67I'm repairing lots of flight cryocool refrigerators.

68That's what we're working on right now.

69That's Ron Ross, and he only fixes refrigerators designed to go to space.

70He's spent the last three decades working on different ways of cooling spacecraft parts.

71He's been with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a while.

72I joined in, I guess, 1968 and retired in 2006, but I'm still working, even though it's several years past retirement.

73Most of my life, I guess from a recreational point of view, I grew up on our ranch in Northern California, and from the time I was six months old until I was a senior in college, I spent every summer on the ranch.

74I don't know if you know anything about ranchers.

75Ranchers do everything.

76So you become a jack of all trades because you work on your tractors, you build new tractors, you build equipment, you do everything.

77And so I was sort of a born engineer from the very beginning.

78And I went through high school, and they didn't necessarily like what I was doing.

79I sort of graduated in the halfway down.

80Ron didn't immediately enroll at a university.

81He didn't apply to any.

82Instead, he went to Pasadena City College, a community college near Los Angeles, before transferring to UC Berkeley to major in engineering.

83And so the first summer I didn't spend at the ranch, I worked for Aerojet Corporation down here in Southern California, working on reentry vehicles and Apollo thrusters and stuff on their engine test line and this sort of thing.

84Ron's first taste of JPL involved working on a concept to use airbags to land something on Mars.

85This was still the late 1960s, so nothing made on Earth had ever touched the red planet at this point.

86It was a fun time back then because the whole space program, everything was brand new.

87Nobody had been in space.

88Nobody knew how things worked in space, how materials survived there.

89And so you had to think outside the box on everything.

90It made it just a fascinating environment to be in because you were learning all the time because you were running tests and doing things essentially that had never been done before.

91In the 1990s, Ron got assigned to a different area entirely, making space refrigerators.

92Well, I'd never done anything in coolers before.

93So this was just switching total careers, but it's the same job in terms of how do you learn about a new technology and get up on the curve.

94You might be asking yourself, isn't space already cold?

95That's true.

96Space is cold.

97But in order to make extremely sensitive measurements of faint light, your detector needs to be as cold as possible.

98So if you're trying to take a picture of something in daylight, you're okay with a room temperature sensor.

99But if you want to take a picture of something that's very cold and just emitting in the infrared, then you have to get the detector down colder than the thing you're trying to take a picture of.

100And in fact, as you start looking out at deep space where things are out there in the Kelvin range, very, very low temperature, then you have to start cooling the detector down to extremely low temperatures.

101The community of engineers working on cryo coolers spans the globe, but it's still a close-knit group, just like with Webb.

102It's a fun program, and it's a very international group of people that are working very collaboratively on it.

103Many kinds of life circumstances lead people to work on the Webb mission.

104While Ron's path took root on a California ranch, Scarlyn Hernandez at the Space Telescope Science Institute has a different story.

105My name is Scarlyn Hernandez, and I'm a spacecraft engineer for the James Webb Space Telescope mission.

106I develop code that helps us to make sure that the spacecraft is functioning optimally while on orbit.

107Born in the Dominican Republic, Scarlyn came to Brooklyn when she was a young girl.

108My father immediately abandoned us.

109So here we were in Brooklyn, New York, with no place to call home, no money.

110We didn't know the English language.

111We were living in poverty.

112There were times we didn't know when we were going to eat the next day.

113In the midst of these challenges, Scarlyn found refuge in looking up.

114When I was a child, I would actually gaze up at the stars at night.

115In the city apartment that I lived in with the police sirens going by, I would stare out of our little window at the stars and just lose myself in them, really.

116I wish I could just grab one with my bare hands if I could just reach far enough.

117Of course, I wished upon a star, like a lot of our stories start, you know, when we hear them as a kid.

118I just felt that, you know, they were magical.

119And I certainly had nothing to lose.

120And to be honest with you, school was the only thing that I had to keep me distracted, to keep me from thinking about my problems.

121So I immersed myself in my studies and I started getting straight A's.

122And then one day, I became the first in my family to graduate middle school and high school.

123And then, thankfully, the National Science Foundation awarded me a full ride to college based on my grades and my scholarly merit.

124Then I became first generation to graduate college as well.

125An internship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center turned into a full-time job working on NASA missions.

126Her first spacecraft was called the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, which operated from 1997 to 2015.

127After assuming some roles there as mission planning lead and systems engineer, propulsion engineer, power engineer, I decided to move on to a deep space mission, which is the James Webb Space Telescope Mission at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

128And I've been working James Webb for about five, six years now.

129I work on the flight operations team.

130And I think there's about 40 of us on the team.

131And we're all in charge of different parts of either the spacecraft or the instruments on the observatory.

132Most recently, Scarlyn and her colleagues have been doing practice runs for how all the different parts of Webb are going to unfold.

133All of this will be commanded remotely back on Earth as Webb soars to one million miles away.

134Everything has to go exactly right.

135So the rehearsals are very detailed.

136They have to prepare for all kinds of unexpected situations.

137I work on the deployment control subsystem and also I do a little work on the propulsion system as well.

138I help with testing out some of the scripts and procedures for the optical telescope element, which consists of the mirrors, controlling the mirrors.

139So you want to test like you fly, fly like you test, and we are making sure that everything is going to be working how we want it to.

140Even though she works on the engineering side, Scarlyn never loses sight of the big picture of this mission.

141What's exciting to me are the mission goals.

142Helping humanity discover the unknown, just learning more about our universe.

143That's what's fascinating to me.

144Scarlyn is very passionate about reaching out to women and underrepresented communities to inspire them to go into STEM fields.

145She has some words of wisdom from her own journey.

146You should never be afraid to ask for help.

147We work in the technical world and things are hard for a reason.

148So sometimes it takes a team to figure something out and there's nothing to be ashamed of about it.

149I never grew up seeing STEM heroes in the media and certainly not the Spanish media.

150All I saw was Selena and Jennifer Lopez, both of which I absolutely love.

151Sometimes I like to think of myself as the J-Lo of STEM.

152A lot of the times I was the only woman in class.

153I always felt it was important to represent and give back.

154Not only show that it's possible, but to show that you can thrive.

155If you work hard and you take advantage of the opportunities you're given, you can make it.

156So here's my message to the world.

157You are truly in control of your own destiny.

158I'm a Hispanic female who grew up in poverty and abuse, but I'm also an engineer that works on a NASA mission.

159Don't listen to the naysayers.

160Go for what you want and don't stop until you get it.

161No matter your background or your circumstance, crawl, walk, run, and jump towards your dream.

162When you believe in yourself, you can do anything.

163Next time on NASA's Curious Universe.

164The day before the launch, we all have together all the launch team a minute.

165Boss is asking around in the circle, did you forget something?

166And this is really an important moment where we all go inside and check and recheck and it is the moment where we decide together, yes, we are ready.

167We are all ready to go.

168This is NASA's Curious Universe.

169This episode was written and produced by Katie Atkinson, Liz Landau, and Christina Dana.

170The Curious Universe team includes Matty Arnold and Michaela Sosby with support from Elissa Fielding.

171Special thanks to Ryland Hegey, Amber Strawn, Paul Geithner, Eric Smith, Natasha Pinole, Elise Fisher, Laura Betts, and the James Webb Space Telescope team.

172If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing with a friend.

173Still curious about NASA?

174You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers.

175You can email a voice recording or send a written note to nasa-curiousuniverse at mail.nasa.gov.

176Go to nasa.gov slash curiousuniverse for more information.