How a 20-year triumph of public-private partnerships may forever change great scientific missions

Sponsored by Northrop Grumman

01 09 2023

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launched a year ago from Kourou, French Guiana, beginning its historic mission to help humanity better understand the universe. And now, roughly six months after the world looked on in awe at the first stunning images of faraway galaxies and celestial formations, Webb’s groundbreaking engineering and technology design continues to astound the senses, boggle the mind and push the boundaries of scientific possibility.

Webb is an infrared telescope designed to study every phase of cosmic history and view objects once thought too old, distant or faint. The ultraviolet and visible light emitted by the very first luminous objects that formed in the universe has been stretched so that it reaches us today, more than 13.5 billion years later, as infrared light, visible to Webb’s unique instruments.

With this ability to look farther into the interstellar past, Webb can see to a time when the earliest stars and galaxies were born. This feat of human ingenuity is set to change our understanding of cosmic connections and give insight into long-considered existential questions such as: “How did we get here?” and “Are we alone?”

Led by Northrop Grumman, the global aerospace and defense technology company, engineers from across the industry addressed and developed solutions to these mind-bending ideas. Engineers needed to create an observatory able to unfold in space with a deployable telescope more than six times larger than Hubble; send it more than a million miles away from Earth; and operate it at extreme cryogenic temperatures. And, they had to invent new technologies nearly every step of the way — many integral to the launch vehicle, image processing, electromechanical systems, thermal systems and complex sunshield.

How much bigger is Webb?

Webb’s primary mirror is the largest ever launched into space and has 6.25 times more collecting area than Hubble’s mirror. Webb’s 21.4 foot mirror gives it a significantly larger collecting area — and allows it to see farther into space than we’ve seen before.

7.9 FT

Hubble Primary Mirror

21.4 FT

How much farther away is Webb?

Hubble was only 332 miles away from Earth. But Webb is approximately one million miles away from Earth — four times the distance the Earth is from the moon.

Performance

How much farther can Webb see?

Telescopes can see through space dust by observing infrared light, and the farthest galaxies in space can only be seen in infrared. Due to its size and design, Hubble can’t see as far back in time — to when the first galaxies formed — as Webb has done.

In the past, space exploration often inherited technologies from other areas. Webb was different. “Nothing was easy,” said Scott Willoughby, vice president and program manager for Webb at Northrop Grumman who, alongside several of his teammates, earned NASA's highest level of recognition of non-governmental individuals for his exceptional contributions to Webb. “We ran into so many challenges so often that people began to ask: ‘Is this too hard? Can it really be done?’”

That quest to push the boundaries of invention became a central theme of the 20-year development, said Matt Mountain, Webb telescope scientist and president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.

“Webb continually operated near the edge of the impossible," Mountain said. "It was an act of collective genius. The technology and the science will bring history together at a single, irreversible point, illuminating that we are capable of discovering whether we are alone in the universe.”

Teamwork on a galactic level

In Sept. 2002, NASA announced that Northrop Grumman would lead its industry team as the prime contractor for designing and developing the most critical components of this ”next-generation space telescope.”

From an organizational standpoint, Webb is a 20-year triumph of public-private partnership. It took three space agencies (NASA, Canadian Space Agency and European Space Agency), more than 400 companies, 10,000 scientists and engineers, and 300 scientific/academic organizations from 29 U.S. states and 14 countries.

Compared to other contemporary space projects in the public and private sector, the size and scale of Webb’s mission made it something uniquely different — and a challenge that was a huge difficulty to build. For many Northrop Grumman employees, the opportunity to work on Webb, constructing one of the most complex space telescopes ever, was the opening for boundless opportunity.

Webb is the biggest, most complicated telescope we've ever built. Thousands of people worked on this over almost 20 years. Why did they do that? Because, they knew in the end it was going to push the limits of humanity.”

— Matt Mountain President of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy

The workings of Webb

The long history of astronomy — from the first tiny glass lens telescopes built in the Netherlands in the 1600s, to the 200-inch giant mirror telescope at Palomar Observatory — has been a steady quest to increase the amount of light collected from the sky. Telescopes are like large binoculars that let us see distant objects better. The larger the aperture (the diameter of the primary mirror), the more detail one can see in astronomical objects that are far away and faint.

Generally, when it comes to telescopes, bigger is always better. The largest telescopes in the world are often the most successful at making new discoveries due to their ability to collect greater amounts of light. But Webb was going to be different in many ways. For starters, you can’t lift a giant telescope into space — at least not just yet. And Webb will not orbit the Earth, as Hubble does.

Instead, Webb was sent approximately a million miles away to Lagrange Point 2 — a position in space where the gravitational pull of two nearby orbiting bodies (the sun and the Earth in this case) counterbalances one another and allows things to orbit in place. This makes Lagrangian points little parking spots in space that allow satellites to sit in a relatively stable position, using a minimal amount of fuel to stay in place.

Hubble was a monolithic spacecraft that was robotically extracted from the mission bay of the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990. Webb, on the other hand, would be more like a transformer, the fictional alien robot car. As a 14,300 pound observatory, and first space deployable telescope — it would be tightly packed into a storage bay atop a large rocket-like origami before it unfolded itself in space.

Understanding the
James Webb Observatory

The Spacecraft Bus

The spacecraft bus is a key structural component, providing the support functions for the operation of the Observatory and allows this huge, delicate observatory to operate in space. The bus houses the six major subsystems needed to operate the spacecraft, from the Electrical Power Subsystem, the Attitude Control Subsystem, the Communication Subsystem and more.

Designing a lightweight observatory that could survive launch and then deploy in space and operate in cryogenic temperatures presented an array of challenges for engineers. “It’s a weird combination — the telescope has to be lightweight so you can launch it, but then has to be stiff so it doesn’t break when you launch,” Mountain said.

Willoughby added that to operate at cryogenic temperatures you must use soft materials that can expand in predictable ways. “It all has to work right the first time because it's up in space,” he said. “It isn't an airplane. I can't land it on the tarmac and go fix it again and send it back up.”

The most iconic part of Webb is its gold-plated mirror, 21 feet in diameter. That mirror took eight years to build and polish, Willoughby said, adding “we needed to get its surface accuracy so precise that every one of the very faint photons that hit that mirror could be converted into information.”

In order to detect the extremely faint heat signals of astronomical objects incredibly far away, the telescope elements must remain very cold. They can’t emit heat, which is also infrared light, because it would interfere with Webb’s ability to detect those distant objects. To help maintain the extreme temperatures, Webb features a tennis-court-sized deployable sunshield made of five thin layers, each thinner than a human hair. Its reflective quality helps prevent heat transfer through radiation by simply bouncing that radiation back to space. The sunshield must be light, strong, reflective, resistant to degradation from solar radiation and dimensionally stable across a range of temperatures.

Dream of a lifetime

What Webb demonstrates, many in the project say, is how much can be obtained via the collective power of a team. “Webb has already taught us a heck of a lot,” Mountain said. “But one of its most powerful lessons is its ability to show us how much we can accomplish together.”

For many employees at Northrop Grumman, the opportunity to work on Webb was the dream of a lifetime. “I first heard about it when I was in middle school,” said Krystal Puga, a mission architect on Webb. Puga has worked on Webb for 10 of her 14 years at Northrop Grumman and was a hardware manager for its release mechanisms. That’s a big task — there are 178 release mechanisms sprinkled all over the telescope, which kickstart the major deployments. They needed to work flawlessly. “With many of these, we have one opportunity to get it right or the mission would be in jeopardy,” Puga said.

Deployment

Q&A With

Krystal Puga, Spacecraft Systems Engineer, Northrop Grumman

As the Webb telescope was too large to fit inside any current rockets, the Webb telescope launched as a compact configuration and then unfurled in space. Krystal Puga’s team made that possible by building a series of 178 release mechanisms that kickstarted the major deployments that Webb underwent over two weeks in space.

Just unfolding the sunshield alone requires 300 steps, enabled by a complex system of pulleys, motors, cables, bearings and springs that deployed the sunshield into a precise shape. For Puga, “that was 300 chances for a 20-plus-year project to fail.” So, her team practiced every procedure thousands of times. “Every opportunity we had to test, we did,” she said.

“Our goal was simple: No surprises.”

Striking results

But there have been surprises. The biggest so far? “How well it worked,” Mountain said. “We had thousands of people on this project managing hundreds of points of failure. Then, we had to assemble a telescope in space. To do that we had to make a lot of assumptions. Are our calculations right? How will the telescope work in Zero-G? Did we understand the role of the launch vibrations?”

So far, the telescope is performing extraordinarily well. Since its historic first view of the universe in July, Webb has delivered stunning images and scientific data of the cosmos that make for headline news and land on the front pages of countless newspapers around the world. These include breathtaking images of faraway galaxies, rings of dust created by the violent interactions between two stars, and eerie blue and red images of the iconic Pillars of Creation. Webb also helped record the first successful planetary defense mission, when it documented NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which collided a spacecraft into an asteroid.

Discoveries

Tarantula Nebula

The Tarantula Nebula is the largest, brightest, star-forming region of galaxies closest to our Milky Way. This image revealed tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars.

All images are from NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

As Webb shows us our cosmic past and charts a potential future for science, it has also made a powerful impact here on earth. The visceral power of the images that Webb sends back is also expected to ignite the imaginations of the next generation of scientists, engineers and dreamers, who will create new exploratory missions.

For Mountain, the biggest discovery will be what comes next. He says Webb has the opportunity to push humanity’s potential discoveries even further, especially as scientists continue to build on the success of Webb and develop new, even bigger telescopes.

“Webb has shown us some incredible things, but we can put an indelible dent in our history if we discover that we're no longer alone,” said Mountain. “Suddenly we think, ‘Oh my God, evolution occurred elsewhere, there are other living things out there?’ Humanity's been asking this question for thousands of years. We've never been able to answer it. Webb tells us it’s possible.”

For Willoughby, the big takeaway is the effect Webb will have on future technologies and our ability to define “possible.” “I'm going to be most proud when the next telescope comes out that is built on what I'll call, ‘the revolution Webb created,’” said Willoughby.

I'm waiting for that moment in time where, serendipitously, we either disprove something or we find something that makes us fundamentally think differently."

— Scott Willoughby

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