NASA's Curious Universe - Webb Space Telescope: The Global Village

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

A scientist from Italy who studies baby stars. A Californian spacecraft refrigeration pioneer. A Dominican-American engineer who saw space as her refuge from a tough life at home. Meet three people who represent a small slice of the thousands who have worked on Webb worldwide.

I was fortunate enough to see the telescope completed in the clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center. And at that moment, it kind of hits you. You've been working on your little thing, you know, and you say, well, you know, it's part of a big, big mission. And then you see it, and it's magnificent, and it's huge. And you are there, and you know you've been part of it. I'm getting even emotional. 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.

Since 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. And it hits you when you see it, because it's really fantastic. This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. The James Webb Space Telescope will be the biggest and most complex science telescope to ever fly in space. In the previous episodes of this mini-series, we've talked about the amazing science.

that Web will do, and the innovative engineering that helps make it so powerful for space exploration. Putting together something this big and ambitious takes a lot of people. Teams of dedicated people around the world with many different skills and backgrounds. So let's meet a few people helping to make this mission happen. So thousands of people have participated to Web. Every single component matters. Every single screw, every single detail is a key part of the success of this mission. That's Antonella Notta, the project scientist for Webb for the European Space Agency, or ISA.

I work out of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where we have a contingence of ISA-funded personnel in support of the mission. Along with the Canadian Space Agency, ISA is a space agency partner in the web mission. The European Space Agency has contributed not only people, but two instruments. And of course, this extraordinary observatory will be launched on a European rocket, the Ariane 5.

Europe is very, very committed and interested in this exciting mission and where you. just looking forward to see finally the lift-off. Antonella was born in Venice, Italy, and has been with the Space Telescope Science Institute since 1986. Her role with Issa began about 10 years ago. So my day starts very early because I'm dealing with Europe a lot, so I have to account for the six-hour difference.

But 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 web, about science, about what's coming. And my job is also to ensure that the public is fully informed. Antonella 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. These stars are surrounded by gas and dust, but Webb's infrared vision can cut right through all that fog to see them. We look at them in the first two or three million years, that for Star Cluster is like the equivalent of a first year of life for a human. And we see what they do because the way they form and the way to they grow will tell us what they will do when they are adult, when they are full fled stars. And we think that Webb will really unveil that process,

completely. Because we really do not know how stars form. Because Web is able to see through the dust. We reveal those first stages. Building, integrating and testing Web took the efforts of thousands of people across 14 countries, 29 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. They represent the participation of around 300 distinct companies, 8,000. agencies and universities. Having those different partners contribute expertise is crucial to the mission's success. It is fundamental because no agency can do it all alone, and especially if you want to do the biggest thing, you have to work at it together.

That's what diversity in science and engineering is all about. Not only you have additional resources, but you have also the different perspectives, the different cultural contributions. One community is specialized in building imaging devices, another might be more specialized in building spectrograph. And 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, and I need to design something that allows me to see it. We have seen in science that international team are the norm. And the language of science overcomes the national barrier, overcomes the difference in the individual national languages. So it's also, I think it's good

for humanity. It helps everybody grow and it makes a much better and ambitious project at the end. On launch day, Antonella won't be at the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, where Webb will take off from. Instead, she'll be in Baltimore, monitoring the first signals of how the telescope is doing in space. But liftoff will still be very special for her. You 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.

Some people have built their careers in this telemarking. You watch this thing lifting off. It's just saying goodbye to your baby. At that point, I will have shivers down my spine. Another important part of the web 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. Temperature control is an essential part of designing a spacecraft,

but it doesn't necessarily translate to home refrigerators. No, I stay away from my own, you mean the one in my kitchen. I'm repairing lots of flight cryocool for refrigerators. That's what we're working on right now. That's Ron Ross, and he only fixes refrigerators designed to go to space. He's spent the last three decades working on different ways of cooling spacecraft parts. He's been with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laborforcerfts, for a while.

I joined in, I guess, 1968 and retired in 2006, but I'm still working, even though it's several years past retirement. Most 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. summer on the ranch. I don't know if you know anything about ranchers. Ranchers do everything. So you become a jack of all trades because you work on your tractors, you build new tractors, you build equipment, you do everything. And so I was sort of a born engineer from the very beginning. And I went through high school and they didn't necessarily like what I was doing.

I sort of graduated halfway down. Ron didn't immediately enroll at a university. He didn't apply to any. Instead, he went to Pasadena City College, a community college near Los Angeles, before transferring to UC Berkeley to major in engineering. And 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 lines.

and this sort of thing. Ron's first taste of JPL involved working on a concept to use airbags to land something on Mars. This was still the late 1960s, so nothing made on Earth had ever touched the red planet at this point. It was a fun time back then because the whole space program, everything was brand new. Nobody had been in space. Nobody knew how things worked in space, how materials survived there. And so you had to think outside the box on everything. It 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. In the 1990s, Ron got assigned to a different area entirely, making space refrigerators. Well, I'd never done anything in coolers before. So 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. You might be asking yourself, isn't space already cold? That's true. Space is cold. But in order to make extremely sensitive measurements of faint light, your detector needs to be as cold as possible. So if you're trying to take a picture of something in daylight, you're okay with a room temperature sensor, but 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. And 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. The community of engineers working on cryocoolers spans the globe, but it's still a close-knit group, just like with Webb. It's a fun program, and it's a very international group of people that are working

very collaboratively on it. Many kinds of life circumstances lead people to work on the Webb mission. While Ron's path took root on a California ranch, Scarlin Hernandez at the Space Telescope Science Institute has a different story. My name is Scarlin Hernandez, and I'm a spacecraft engineer for the James Webb Space Telescope mission.

I developed code that helps us to make sure that the spacecraft is functioning optimally while on orbit. Born in the Dominican Republic, Scarlin came to Brooklyn when she was a young girl. My father immediately abandoned us, so here we were in Brooklyn, New York, with no place to call home, no money. We didn't know the English language. We were living in poverty. There were times we didn't know when we were going to eat the next day. In the midst of these challenges, Scarlin found refuge in looking up. When I was a child, I would actually gaze up at the stars at night. In 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.

And wish I could just grab one with my bare hands if I could just reach far enough. Of course, I wished upon a star, like a lot of our stories start, you know, when we hear them as a kid. I just felt that, you know, they were magical. And I certainly had nothing to lose. And 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. So I immersed myself in my studies and I started getting straight A's and then one day I became the first in my family to graduate middle school and high school. And then thankfully, the National Science Foundation awarded me a full ride to college based on my grades and my scholarly merit. Then I became first student. generation to graduate college as well. An internship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center turned into a full-time job working on NASA missions. Her first spacecraft was called the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, which operated from

1997 to 2015. 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. And I've been working James Webb for about five, six years now. I work on the flight operations team,

and I think there's about 40 of us on the team, and we're all in charge of different parts of either the spacecraft or the instruments on the observatory. Most recently, Scarlin and her colleagues have been doing practice runs for how all the different parts of Webb are going to unfold. All of this will be commanded remotely back on Earth as Webb soars to one million miles away. Everything has to go exactly right. So the rehearsals are very detailed. They have to prepare for all kinds of unexpected situations.

I work on the deployment control subsystem and also. So I do a little work on the propulsion system as well. I help with testing out some of the scripts and procedures for the optical telescope element, which consists of the mirrors, controlling the mirrors. So 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. Even though she works on the engineering side, Scarlin never loses sight of the big picture of this mission.

What's exciting to me are the mission goals. Helping humanity discover the unknown, just learning more about our universe. That's what's fascinating to me. Scarlin is very passionate about reaching out to women and underrepresented communities to inspire them to go into STEM fields. She has some words of wisdom from her own journey. You should never be afraid to ask for help.

We work in the technical world and things are hard for a reason. So sometimes it takes a team to figure something out and there's nothing to be ashamed of about it. I never grew up seeing STEM heroes in the media and certainly not the Spanish media. All I saw was Selena and Jennifer Lopez, both of which I absolutely love.

Sometimes I like to think of myself as the J-Lo of STEM. A lot of the times I was the only woman in class. I always felt it was important to represent and give back, not only show that it's possible, but to show that you can thrive. If you work hard and you take advantage of the opportunities you're given, you can make it. So here's my message to the world.

You are truly in control of your own destiny. I'm a Hispanic female who grew up in poverty and abuse, but I'm also an engineer that works on a NASA mission. Don't listen to the naysayers. Go for what you want and don't stop until you get it. No matter your background or your circumstance, crawl, walk, run, and jump towards your dream. When you believe in yourself, you can do anything.

Next time on NASA's curious universe. Before the launch, we all have together all the launch team a minute. Boss is asking around in the circle, did you forget something? And 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. We are all ready to go. This is NASA's Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by Katie Atkinson, Liz Landau and Christina Dana.

Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold and Michaela Sosby, with support from Elisa Fielding. Special thanks to Rylent Heggy, Amber Strone, Paul Geithner, Eric Smith, Natasha Pinol, Elise Fisher, Laura Betz, and the James WebSpace Telescope team. If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing with a friend. Still curious about NASA? send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers. You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-curiousuniverse at mail.nassah.gov.

Go to nassah.gov slash curiousuniverse for more information.