TECH

Webb telescope to see farther, better than Hubble

James Dean
FLORIDA TODAY
Dr. John C. Mather, a JWST Senior Project Scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center and also shared the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics gives a lecture Thursday night at the Florida Tech's W. Lansing Gleason Performing Arts Center on his latest project the James Webb Space Telescope, in front of a packed house.

NASA’s next great observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, is progressing steadily toward a launch in just over two years, the mission’s senior project scientist said Thursday during a visit to the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne.

“We are still on track for a launch October 2018, no change in that, which to me is a remarkable accomplishment,” said John Mather, a Nobel Laureate based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in an interview. "Because it’s so easy to miss something when you’re planning a big project.”

The project in 2011 survived what Mather called a “near-death” experience, undergoing a major reorganization that pushed back by four years its planned launch from French Guiana on a European Ariane 5 rocket.

The mission’s budget ballooned to nearly $9 billion, a 78 percent increase over where it began.

John Mather, a Nobel Laureate and senior project scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, holds a scale model of the observatory during a visit Thursday to the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne.

But the payoff is expected to be huge for the infrared observatory dubbed the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

“What we hope to do is to see farther and better than the Hubble can do, with a bigger telescope and also one that is cold, so it can pick up infrared light that we can’t see with our eyes,” said Mather. “We hope to look farther out into space to see the first stars and galaxies being born. We hope to look inside clusters where new stars are being born today, even to study the solar system and planets like ours around other stars.”

Mather and Stefanie Milam, the mission’s deputy project scientist for planetary science, on Thursday visited the Melbourne offices of Northrop Grumman, the Webb telescope’s prime contractor.

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They met in the afternoon with dozens of Brevard County students in grades 5 through 12 at Florida Tech’s Denius Student Center.

And at 7 p.m., Mather delivered a free, public presentation at the Gleason Performing Arts Center, “Observing the Universe with the James Webb Space Telescope.”

“One of the aims of events like this is to educate the public on the impact that the telescope is going to have,” said Prof. Dan Batcheldor, head of Florida Tech’s Department of Physics and Space Sciences. “Because at the end of the day, it’s the members of this type of audience that are going to grow up to be the next generation of scientists, engineers and mathematicians that are going to allow us to keep moving our technology forward.”

Mather, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on cosmic background radiation, was visiting Florida Tech at the invitation of graduate student Michael Finch, who has interned at Goddard.

After the complex Webb project’s early challenges, Mather said most of the telescope’s components are complete and now beginning to be assembled and undergo testing.

Bob Brown of Melbourne and Maria Galuez of Mexico City a FIT student gets a photo taken with Dr. John C. Mather, a JWST Senior Project Scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center and also shared the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics before his lecture Thursday night at the Florida Tech's W. Lansing Gleason Performing Arts Center on his latest project the James Webb Space Telescope, in front of a packed house.

The observatory is an engineering marvel, featuring a gold-plated primary mirror measuring 21 feet across that offers seven times more collecting area than the Hubble.

A sun shield the size of a tennis court will keep the Webb operating at temperatures near absolute zero.

“The telescope will be very, very, very cold in outer space,” said Mather. “So cold that if you were a bumble bee hovering out there at the distance of the moon, we would be able to find you.”

Those pieces must fold up to fit inside the rocket’s nose cone, then unfurl in space.

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From a position one million miles from Earth, the infrared observatory is expected to operate for at least five years, carrying enough fuel to last more than double that.

The Hubble has produced gorgeous images of dust clouds where stars are forming, but can’t see inside them.

With the Webb capturing infrared light, “We can see inside the clouds, we can see the stars being born,” said Mather.

In addition to peering far back in time to observe the earliest galaxies, the telescope is expected to observe planets orbiting other stars and help determine if they are like Earth.

“Every time we build a big new telescope, it opens up a new territory,” said Mather. “Something always turns up.”

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 orjdean@floridatoday.com.And follow on Twitter at@flatoday_jdeanand on Facebook atfacebook.com/jamesdeanspace.