Telescope Terps

Soon after its Christmas launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began to gently unfurl like a 70-foot robot butterfly as it glided toward a point in orbit around the sun about a million miles from the Earth. For the last few months, it’s been cooling down to space temperatures and tooling up as mission controllers prepare to open the farthest-seeing eye ever trained on the cosmos.

The telescope was built just around the corner from the University of Maryland at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and many UMD faculty and alums have orbited the project in its three-decade history. They designed, built and tested the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (still going strong with plenty of Terp support) and are closely involved in operations, mission planning and eventual translation of Webb Space Telescope discoveries to the public.

One of the first astronomers who’ll use it, Assistant Professor Eliza Kempton, is part of an “early release science program” to begin producing results the moment JWST comes online sometime this summer. Soon after that, the telescope will provide observations for two projects she’s leading or co-leading focused on “sub-Neptunes”—mysterious exoplanets surrounded by currently impenetrable haze.

JWST’s advanced instruments and giant, 21.5-foot-wide gold-plated mirror will capture unprecedented information about sub-Neptune atmospheres, she says, and help kickstart the study of potentially habitable environments and the search for the ingredients that make life possible on Earth.

“We’ve been waiting so long it feels almost surreal,” she says. “It’s like a dream the astronomy community is waking up from, and suddenly it’s here.”

The telescope was built to peer far through space—and thus back in time—nearly to the beginning of everything, says College Park Professor John Mather. He is the senior JWST project scientist and winner of a Nobel Prize in physics for his work with an earlier Goddard-built spacecraft to map cosmic background radiation left painted across the sky by our universe’s explosive debut.

“The universe looks very different when you have infrared eyes,” Mather says. “We’re going after the first obvious objects that grew from the big bang material, the first stars, the first galaxy, the first black holes, the first exploding stars—all the way up to the present time and what’s happening now in our own small neighborhood in the solar system.”

UMD alums have played key roles in building and operating the Webb Space Telescope, including:

• Nasif Ahmed ’14, flight operations simulations engineer at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
• Wen-Hsien Chuang Ph.D. ’05 and Dan Kelly ’02, M.S. ’05, developers of the microshutter array for JWST’s near-infrared spectrograph
• Matthew Feeney ’14, Mission Operations Center flight control team engineer, STScI
• Sonya Hopson ’03, project safety engineer at Goddard
• Alexandra Lockwood ’07, project scientist, science communications lead at STScI
• Alyssa Pagan ’16, science visuals developer at STScI
• Keith Parrish ’89, commissioning manager at Goddard
• Joe Pollizzi M.S. ’77, Science and Operations Center ground systems development manager at STScI
• Eric Smith M.S. ’85, Ph.D. ’88, JWST program scientist and Astrophysics Division chief scientist at NASA HQ
• Christopher Stark Ph.D. ’10, deputy integration, test and commissioning project scientist at Goddard
• Patrick Taylor ’87, flight operations systems engineering architect at STScI
• Kan Yang M.S. ’10, OTIS test thermal lead analyst and thermal engineer at Goddard
• Wayne Yu ’10, M.S. ’15, Navigation and Mission Design Branch flight dynamics engineer at Goddard

Several astronomy faculty members in addition to Kempton have secured “observing time” through a competitive process:

• Alberto Bollato, professor
• Drake Deming, professor emeritus
• Mike Kelly, associate research scientist
• Sylvain Veilleux, professor
• Mark Wolfire, principal research scientist