Big Ideas Lab - CODA Telescope

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

The breakthrough wasn’t a new telescope. It was a new way to build one.For decades, space telescopes were built as exquisite, one-of-a-kind instruments. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took a different approach: design for “good enough” instead of perfect, and rethink how a telescope is manufactured, engineered and integrated for space.The result was CODA, an easily manufacturable, lower-cost telescope that helped turn a small NASA exoplanet mission called Pandora from an idea into something that could actually reach space.This is what becomes possible when innovation gets crafty with the technology that’s already here.Guests featured (in order of appearance):Jordan Karburn - Deputy Project Manager of Pandora and Principal Investigator of the CODA Telescope, LLNLShawn Higbee - Mission Manager for Space Sensing, LLNL--Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series.Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch.Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Matthew Powell.Script by Caroline Kidd.Story Editing by Levi Hanusch.Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell.Narrated by Matthew Powell.Video Production by Levi Hanusch.Brought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

towering warehouse shelves stretch out beneath rows of fluorescent lights. The scientist walking between them scans every section looking for the material he needs. It's meant for a spacebound telescope set to launch from the SpaceX Rideshare, Twilight, a cosmic carpool with restrictions on weight, size, durability, and then he sees it. It's just a little too high on the shelf. On Isle 14, Bay SC3 of his local hardware store. From a manufacturability standpoint, aluminum is really easy. It's cheap.

Seeing the raw material cost for like the blanks of Cota, it's 60-61-T6, you can buy these billets off of Home Depot McMaster car. A couple hundred bucks. There's nothing fancy about it. The scientists weren't actually purchasing these specific materials through a hardware store checkout line. But the project did require stripping the telescope down to its manufacturing basics. The challenge was that there was no standard telescope to start from.

Ground telescopes and astronomical telescopes, they're all unique. One shares virtually zero DNA with any other. The part's commonality is close to zero. Space telescopes tend to be a little bit more standardized, but on a permission basis, they still tend to be unique snowflakes. decades, telescope makers created custom instruments to help make the invisible observable. But after the turn of the century, satellites were getting smaller. Launch opportunities were becoming more frequent and missions were no longer limited to only

the big players. Space had changed. The way we built telescopes had not. Lawrence Livermore set out to change that, not by building a better telescope. but by challenging how telescopes were built at all. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow today.

For centuries, telescopes have helped us see. farther than the human eye alone ever could. They've carried our vision past the edge of our atmosphere, across our solar system, and toward worlds we may never physically reach. And as our curiosities have grown more ambitious, the telescopes we build to investigate them have become even more powerful and complex. Today, we can place them aboard small satellites, where they act as payloads, send them into orbit,

and use them to study parts of the universe, that once felt impossibly distant. But underneath all of that progress is a surprisingly old process. Beginning in the 1590s, glassmaking and lens grinding techniques have been vastly improving. It's only a matter of time

until someone holds two lenses together and discovers just exactly what they can do. An extended eyeglass, in other words, which is soon to be known as the telescope. And what Galileo's telescope is doing for us is making obvious. that hadn't been visible before, now visible to us. This really hasn't changed a whole lot since the days of Galileo.

Meet Sean Higby, the original program manager behind the Coda Telescope and the mission manager for space sensing at Lawrence Livermore. At the heart of a telescope is its mirror. It gathers incoming light and directs it into an image, which means its shape has to be extraordinarily precise. And creating that precision has traditionally. required a lot of time, patience, and repetition. How traditional glass telescopes are made is for the primary mirror, you make one blank.

They all work about the same, where you take the part and you rub on it, literally. You grind it in rough shape, and then you polish it, and you rub on it to change the figure, i.e., what's the mathematical shape of the surface, and then you go test it, and then you rub on it some more in the high spots, and you go test it again, you rub on it some more in the high spots, and you go test it again, you rub on it some more in the high spots, and you go test it again, And you wash, rinse, and repeat this process, and as we jokingly say, we all grow old together while you rub on the surface of this mirror, because it just takes that long. Galileo might not recognize the telescopes we build today, but he would recognize the patience required to make their mirrors. Each mirror is also made with a particular purpose in mind. Its shape and its tolerance are all being built around the specific mission the telescope is designed to assist. There's relatively few people that make them. They tend to be very, very expensive. The lead time is really long. There's not a lot of organizations that can buy them or could afford them, certainly at the kind of astronomical prices that they used to cost and typically cost. If a government customer went to the industrial base and says, hey, we want a telescope of about this half meter aperture, you could easily expect prices back in the $20 to $40 million price point for quantity one or two.

In 2013, 11 tiny satellites rode the same rocket. By 2015, companies were competing to launch their own small spacecraft markets. Space was becoming more accessible. But the telescope remained one of the hardest pieces to get to space. It was slow to build, expensive to buy, and difficult to repeat. The answer was a different kind of telescope. No one gets an award as a scientist for building, a system that's below perfect.

Oh, what'd you do? Well, I made the perfect thing even more perfect, right? And Coda is about a different thing. Cota is not an acronym. That's Jordan Carburn, the principal investigator of the Cota Telescope at Lawrence Livermore. Cota is the name of a family of telescopes that we at Lawrence Livermore started developing in collaboration with Corning Specialty Materials back in 2016. And the idea back then was to have a quote-unquote good enough optical image.

Imaging instrument, a telescope, that was good enough, that could be proliferated, that could be widely and easily manufactured, that could be cheap, that could be quick to make. Kota would take shape by combining two very different kinds of expertise. Lawrence Livermore brought optical design and systems engineering, while Korning brought manufacturing capabilities the lab didn't have in-house. Corning brought a really unique thing to the party, some really unique coding technology, and any fabrication technologies. Specifically for aluminum.

And not just aluminum for the telescopes, frame, or housing, for the mirrors themselves. From a manufacturability standpoint, aluminum is really easy. And then from a machining standpoint, aluminum is relatively soft. So it's easy on your CNC's and your mills and all of this stuff to be able to machine it into shape.

You can do that quickly, which then means you can kind of batch these out in quantities. That made a completely, different manufacturing strategy possible. In a glass telescope world, A must be perfect. B must be perfect. They must be perfect together, and they travel their whole life together. Not so in this world.

It's the realization that, well, wait a minute, if A and B are disposable, and C and D are disposable, and I have this ability to play this gambling, I can play this game where only 10% of them need to be good to make this strategy work. The yield can be astonishingly low, and the strategy works. all of a sudden I can cherry pick, and now if I can cherry pick components, I can actually look at also how well do the components play with each other? It's roughly a 10x savings. And while an almost all aluminum telescope has major benefits, choosing an ordinary material for an extraordinary job also introduced new engineering challenges. The downside of aluminum is that it has a high coefficient of thermal expansion.

CTE. So aluminum is a good conductor. You have aluminum pans or heat straps. That means that it moves heat very well, but what that translates to is that the material actually grows and shrinks meaningfully with temperature fluctuations. For a frying pan, that expansion and contraction would barely be noticeable. But telescope optics operate on an entirely different scale. Small changes in the curvature of the mirror or the distance

between components can affect how precisely the instrument focuses light, degrading the image it produces. When you're dealing with optical systems, especially in visible wavelengths of light, 400 to 800 nanometers of wavelength of light that we're looking at, and then it has a near-infrared spectrometer. You can have these large structural changes that are changing like the radius of curvature of the mirror, that are changing the relative alignment of these systems. That can be challenging. It would be like trying to measure something microscopic with a ruler that subtly stretches and shrinks every time the temperature changes. At the scale, these telescopes operate with targets light years away, even tiny shifts can throw the system off.

So part of the clever design and engineering of Kota was that the optical and mechanical prescriptions, the design, was such that everything grew and shrink at the same rates. It's a generalization. but the system remained in focus as it varied in temperature. The team turned the problem into a design constraint. If aluminum moves, everything that matters needs to move with it. So that was a really big benefit then of how you're able to actually use this highly manufacturable material, but that is not stable. To keep Coda in focus, every part of the telescope had to respond as part of the same system.

Lawrence Livermore's role was to coordinate that behavior across the optics, mechanics, and thermal design. Livermore was then able to lend a lot of its expertise in high-performance computing to try and help mature the design and to be able to answer, is it good enough? You can test it. A lot of times testing is really expensive. It requires all kinds of special equipment. So Livermore was able to support a lot through modeling and simulation, and that expertise is then built up both from all the optical expertise and optical modeling that was. developed for the National Ignition Facility. So the main optical engineers at Lawrence had all come from supporting the NIF. That system's thinking didn't stop with modeling. Once the team understood how Koda needed to behave, they had to engineer a physical structure

that could preserve that behavior in space. The spacecraft, they look like they're nice and stable and still. They're not. The reality is they go, waka, waka, waka, in space, they're slowly and gently rattling your telescope throughout its entire lifecycle. Well, you have to manage that vibration. What was the Livermore addition? What we did was actually on the optical systems engineering of how do you get it in the box?

How do you manage the thermal state? The thermal state is the temperature conditions surrounding the telescope and how those conditions change as it moves through space. If you actually control the insulation of the box, the container that goes around the system, if you control where the heaters are at, you can actually turn something that was a problem into something that's a benefit. By then, Cota had become more than an aluminum mirror. It was manufacturing, optics, modeling, thermal engineering, and structure all working together.

If you take the smartphone, which many of us have in our pockets, it's this aggregation of technology where before we had the smartphone, we all had telephones, we all had cameras, We all had the ability to record things and we had the ability to shoot video, but we didn't have that aggregated into one product and into one thing that we could carry around in our pockets and all of us have that capability. Coda was built around a simple promise. Make a capable space telescope faster, cheaper, and repeatable enough that more missions could actually afford one.

But that promise only mattered if a real mission was willing to build around it. That opportunity came once. with Pandora. It's January 4th and the first email in my inbox that I see was the selection letter from NASA. Does this mean what I think it means? Like, did we actually like, oh my God? When scientists search for planets around distant stars,

they rarely see the planet at all. They watch the star and wait for the planet to pass in front of it, dimming the light by a tiny fraction. As a planet passes in front of its star, It blocks some of the light, causing a slight drop in brightness. It's hard enough to see the other stars that the planet is orbiting. The stars are giant. The planets are really small.

If I can see the star, I can take data of the star, and then the exoplanet would transit in front of the star, based on Pandora's perspective, and I see a little change in signal. And when I say little change, you're talking about a couple of parts per million. This is like noticing one specific person putting on a jacket in a stadium of a million people. The whole method rests on one assumption, that the star itself stays perfectly steady while you watch. But stars don't stay steady. We know from our own sun, stellar activities, solar storms, sun spots, stars are very active. And what can happen is that the changes in the star, when you take this differential measurement,

you can end up then getting false positives or false negatives. It can mask some things. So when scientists get excited about a discovery, they have to ask a terrifying question. Did this signal come from the planet, or did the star just trick us? The Pandora Mission was designed to solve this problem. Instead of one quick look at a planet, it would stare at a single star for days and weeks, building a detailed record of the star's behavior, so scientists could finally subtract the star's light

from the planet's background. It's a $20 million cost cap, which sounds like a lot of money. The NASA team ran the numbers. The telescope they needed simply would not fit inside a budget that small, not through the traditional market, which is exactly the market Cota was built to break. It was really just peanut butter and jelly. They needed a project manager,

management and an engineering institution. They needed a telescope. We were looking to expand our presence and helping lead missions and try and then get flight heritage for this telescope. Pandora couldn't afford to build every part of the mission from scratch. So the team looked at what already existed. One step was taking a carpool with SpaceX. Pandora was launched on a transporter-like mission, and it was the first traditional ride share mission launched through the NASA venture class acquisition of dedicated and rideshare contract. There is no main satellite. You could think of the school bus, right?

Of like, hey, everyone get on the school bus. I'm going to school and dropping everyone off. Meanwhile, across the country, just outside of Denver, Blue Canyon Technologies was already building 10 of the same spacecraft bus for another government customer, the platform that provides the telescopes with power, propulsion, and other essential systems. It was truly, no kidding, a commercial off-the-shelf spacecraft bus.

No design modifications. The company Blue Canyon Technologies, they're out of Colorado. They had made a Saturn class, an Espegronde, so think of three feet by three feet by a one-foot. They built that for another government sponsor. You're building 10 of those. We would like to be number 11, please. However you want to build it, you tell me exactly, we will design our mission around your capability. That decision reflected something bigger about the way Livermore approached Pandora.

Pandora was the first mission that Livermore Project managed, Soup to Nuts. We don't have this big incumbency of like, we've been flying flagship 100 million missions for 70 years. That's in their DNA. Along for the ride with that comes a whole bunch of cultural heritage of how to think about problems, what's allowed, what's not allowed, how do you solve problems? And one of the things I love about Lawrence of Space Program is that we don't have that. Over the next five years, the team had to bring the telescope, spacecraft, and supporting systems together into one flight-ready mission. And near the very end, one small piece of hardware threatened to complicate everything.

You want to talk about embracing meaningful risk? The separation system. The mechanism responsible for releasing Pandora from the rocket had tested slightly outside its specifications. We contacted the vendor. Hey, is this okay? The vendor was like, yes, it's all good. Two thumbs up. Move forward. We contact the vendor again, just as the sanity check. Hey, we're still out of spec. Are we still good? And they're like, well, actually, I don't know. You're probably fine, but we recommend more testing. Yeah. I mean, you know, we're like a week away from having to ship to the launch site. A week from shipping doesn't leave much room to maneuver. The budget was spent and another round of testing wasn't a simple task.

Retesting meant lifting the spacecraft, reinstalling a delicate mechanism, and taking on the risk of damaging something that had already made it this far. We had to talk to SpaceX, our spacecraft provider, NASA's involved. It came to a mission decision that we were like, you know, what are we going to do? I then delivered the message and made the decision that we're not going to retest. We're going to fly. It's going to be okay. There's definitely that like little nag though, right?

Five, four, three, two, one. Injits full power. and lift off of Transporter 17, go SpaceX, go Falcon. At 5.11 a.m. on a cold January morning in 2026, Pandora lifted off from Vandenberg aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, and SpaceX had a camera pointed right at it. It worked out to just be this picture-perfect Hollywood scene. All the other spacecraft had deployed.

Pandora was one of the last two separate, and you just see the curvature of the earth in the background. Pandora's lit, this camera's looking straight at it. And I'm like, if this doesn't separate right now, like if you get the little jolt and it holds on, you're like, this is going to be so bad. You see like Pandora get ejected from the spacecraft. The whole room then goes crazy and everyone's cheering.

Pandora was in orbit. After years of design and testing, Koda had finally become what it was built to be. A telescope on a mission. Eight days later, light from deep space struck its aluminum mirrors and Coda opened its eyes for the first time. Pandora proved Coda could fly. The bigger question is what happens when you build it again and assign it to a new mission. Cota's really designed for like multiple units to take these highly manufacturable systems and support constellations and architectures of five, ten, ten,

150, a thousand different satellites. We've shown as a proof of concept that, yes, you actually can do one. Repeatability is what changes the kinds of missions that become possible. And that matters as NASA opens the door to smaller missions working with much smaller budgets. There is a new class of missions called the Pioneers class, all of them with a $20 million cost cap. Pandora was the first. For missions like these, lower cost isn't just about saving money. It can be the difference between an idea that stays on the ground and one that gets a chance to fly.

We had telescopes before. Why do you think Coda is so special? And the response to that is, well, that may be true. But remember, the day before Coda, none of you had the ability to go to space. So you were sitting on the sidelines because you couldn't participate financially. What Cota did is it enabled all of you to figure out how to get into space. And once they get there, the impact. extends far beyond the people who built the hardware. There's people that are going to get their PhDs using the data from Pandora.

There's people at the Goddard Space Flight Center that are doing amazing stuff with that data. And again, all we did was facilitate it and bring it into existence. That's where Coda's larger promise starts to unfold. Not one telescope, but more opportunities for scientists to explore our curious universe. The thing that I am most passionate about, that I want people, to embrace. I think there's so much untapped capability with existing technologies. Being able to think creatively about the tools that you have. As an engineer, I fall much more into McGiver than I do into inventing the new thing. I get really excited about figuring out how to like pull it off. There are so

many examples in Pandora that just needed that MacGyver out of the box. How can I get crafty with the things that I have? Exploration doesn't always begin with a new invention. Sometimes it begins by seeing new possibilities in what's already here. There's untapped potential with the technologies that we have in front of us that is right for getting crafty. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review.

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