Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Visiting the James Webb Space Telescope

Episode Date: July 7, 2021

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is expected to be 100 times as powerful as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. We talk with three leaders of the effort to build, launch and deploy it as soon as November of this year. These conversations were recorded on the other side of a window facing the Northrop Grumman clean room in which technicians were putting the finishing touches on the observatory. Bruce Betts salutes Webb with a special What’s Up Random Space Fact.  Discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/jwst-vila-ochs-robinsonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Visiting the James Webb Space Telescope, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Have you been to the Grand Canyon? Did the pictures you'd seen of it come close to viewing the real thing? No, they didn't, did they? That's how it is with the James Webb Space Telescope. It's what I discovered a few days ago when I visited the Webb.

You'll hear my conversations with three leaders of the effort to build the space observatory that will be 100 times as powerful as the Hubble. Bruce Betts will put the icing on this cake of science with a JWST random space fact that will have you buzzing. First up are these headlines from the July 2nd edition of the Downlink, our weekly newsletter, which is topped by the image that used to be on the back of my business card. It's our own pale blue dot seen by the Cassini orbiter in a picture that includes the rings of Saturn. Words cannot express its beauty or its profound impact. Our own Andrew Jones has shared video of China's Zhurong rover descending to the Martian surface. You'll find it among these headlines at

planetary.org slash downlink. NASA's NEOWISE has been given a two-year mission extension by NASA. The near-Earth object hunting spacecraft has already observed nearly 2,000 asteroids. We'll be talking with NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor Principal Investigator Amy Meinzer in a couple of weeks. And aviation legend Wally Funk will finally make it into space, nearly 60 years after NASA said no to her and 12 other women. She will ride with Jeff Bezos aboard his New Shepard suborbital capsule on July 20th. Godspeed, Wally. I grew up not far from what used to be the headquarters of TRW in Southern California. The sprawling campus is now a Northrop Grumman facility.

One of the buildings hides a towering clean room. Inside that room, surrounded by Northrop and NASA technicians at Dwarfs, is one of the most wonderful machines ever created. After years of development, construction, and testing, and after billions in cost overruns, a magnificent space observatory is nearly ready for a trip to French Guiana. That's where it will leap into space atop an Ariane 5 rocket headed for Sun-Earth Lagrangian Point 2, often simply called L2. If all goes well, it will spend many years at that spot of balanced gravity that is one and a half million kilometers from Earth.

Scientists around the world trust that it will revolutionize our view of the universe in the way the Hubble Space Telescope started to do more than 31 years ago. Looking down on the clean room from an enclosed gallery near its ceiling, I see the bunny-suited techs swarm around the giant spacecraft. Looking down on the clean room from an enclosed gallery near its ceiling, I see the bunny-suited techs swarm around the giant spacecraft. High above them and nearly at my eye level are 18 stunningly beautiful hexagonal mirrors, each coated with gold. In front of these and leaning outward is the folded sunscreen

that will enable the web to examine at infrared wavelengths everything from planets circling nearby stars to our universe in its infancy. Custom rigs and frames support the telescope. Techs lying on their stomachs are inserted by forklifts deep into the guts of the great instrument. The narrow platforms they lie on look like what they're called, diving boards. With enthusiastic NASA and Northrop Grumman minders looking on, I welcome Bill Oakes. His service as the JWST project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is likely to be the climax of a decades-long aerospace career. We sit down on bar stools where we have a deeply distracting view of his

observatory in front of us. Bill Oakes, welcome to Planetary Radio. I have seen you talking about this marvelous instrument that is right behind the glass outside our little viewing balcony here for so many years, but it is an enormous pleasure to actually welcome you to Planetary Radio. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's quite amazing sitting here looking at the telescope now. I started on the project 10 1⁄2 years ago, and we were still just getting the pieces in. So it's pretty exciting. That's when you became the project manager, right? Yep, in December of 2010.

You have seen so much happen with this spacecraft, because it is a spacecraft, as well as being a telescope, of course. Right, yeah, it's, you know, we really refer to it as an observatory, where the spacecraft is the bottom part, the spacecraft element, and the top part being the telescope and the instruments. But yeah, it's been been pretty amazing over the last, like I said, 10 1⁄2 years just to watch it all start coming together, overcome the challenges and problems that we've had along the way. To get to this point where we have about seven weeks of touch labor here left at North Grumman, at that point NASA will actually take ownership of it,

and we do a little bit more risk reduction work here for the launch site, and then we put it into the shipping container. Man, I know that there has been talk lately, no fault of the web, but that the launch may be delayed somewhat. Still looking at the end of this year? Right now it's still looking like end of November. I think that came up at the press conference a few weeks ago with the European Space Agency with some of the issues that the rocket had.

Their return to flight is still on for July 27th. There's two flights before us, so there's one July 27th. There's 60 days in between launches, so then you have another one at the end of September, and then we're Thanksgiving weekend. It must be something of a relief to know that the Ariane rocket, that this will be packed away into the payload fairing of, it's a pretty reliable launcher. Yes, it's one of the most reliable launchers out there. I mean, they had some issues last year with the fairing, and they're working through those, and they're very, very transparent

to NASA as well as ESA. We have our friends from Kennedy Space Center working with them also and working with us. So we're really working as one team. So we understand what the problem was and how they're correcting it. So we have confidence that when we launch on the third flight of the, of the, after they return, or second flight, after they return, third flight, after they return to flight, sorry, that, that we have a hundred percent confidence that we're, we're going to be fine. their return to flight, sorry, that we have 100% confidence that we're going to be fine. A lot that has to happen after that, and we'll get to that. But I want to go to your own experience in doing this kind of stuff,

not your first ride around the block. Among the projects that you've worked on for NASA and elsewhere before that, the Hubble Space Telescope, which I will note as we speak, is experiencing some not unexpected troubles. I mean, that wonderful instrument has lasted so long and done such a great job. And, of course, we hope that they are able to fix that computer problem they've got. But does it add a little bit more any sense of urgency to you that at some point, the Hubble is going to reach an end? Well, I think at this point, the urgency, you know, we launch at the end of this year. We're not going to launch before that. One of the things I stress to our folks is don't get too excited. We need to focus on the task each day that we have in front of us to complete that task

in the safest, most successful way to get to the point where we launch. You don't want to rush through anything at this point because a mistake can then cost you even more time. So it's important just to stay focused on the task at hand, and we'll get to the launch in November. You did spend, as I said, quite a bit of time working on the Hubble, on its development, and then went off and did other things. I just wonder how all of that experience has benefited you as the project manager for a tremendous project, one that integrates components, that has international involvement. I mean, just looking out at it, and I only wish that the listeners had this view, I get a better sense than I ever have before of just how complex a machine this is.

Yeah, I think going back to the first part of your question, how things benefited me through my career, I mean, I spent almost 20 years on Hubble, not quite 20 years, starting when it was still in manufacturing and testing. I worked for a contractor that's no longer around, Bendix Guidance Systems Division, that was subcontracted to Lockheed Martin. We developed a lot of the various attitude control system components. I particularly worked on essentially the backup flight computer. So not the flight computer I'm having problems with now, that's the payload computer, but the actual flight computer that controls the observatory.

If I had a problem and it shut down, the one I worked on would take over. And then I went down to Goddard, worked operations before we launched, and then became a NASA employee in 1990. And then I ran the operations out of Goddard for the first two Hubble servicing missions before leaving Hubble. And then went on to do project management. So all those experiences, like the experiences in Hubble, it was a very large mission. JVST is a very large mission.

The challenges were very different because of the technologies and what we're trying to do. But the way you work together as a team, which is always a good, that's one of the big lessons you bring, that stays. It doesn't matter what the challenge is. You want that, working together as a team. When you have missions like JWST, like Hubble, one contractor can't go off and do it. NASA just can't go off and do it. It takes, in the case of JWST, a very large team of contractors and NASA in the U.S., our partners in Canada, and our partners over in Europe to really pull this all together.

One of us couldn't have done it by ourselves. So I think that's always a good sense that comes out of it. And then there's other lessons. And then when I left Hubble, I became a project manager and started with a very small mission, so a very big contrast with Hubble, a mission called the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, working with the University of Colorado. We launched that. Then I moved on to what's now known as Landsat 8, which was at that point the Landsat data continuity mission, and was there for eight years until someone came knocking on my door saying,

hey, we got another job for you. Somebody, they obviously had a lot of confidence in what you were capable of doing to move into a project like this. A lot of what you're talking about, and I assume a lot of your job, is a topic that comes up now and then on our show, but not often enough. And that is the importance of systems engineering. Is that one of the biggest challenges that you face? Because you've got so many moving parts. Yeah, system engineering has always been a big part of JVST. You know, you look at it now, if we were to fully deploy JDVST, it doesn't fit in any test chamber that's anyplace around. So one of the big challenges, and this is a systems engineering challenge, is how do you test this telescope?

You can test it in two pieces, and that's what we've done. So if you take the telescope and the science instruments that's integrated, that component, we call it OTIS. it's a acronym of acronyms but just think it is the telescope and the four science instruments integrated together we were able to take that that was all integrated together at Goddard Space Flight Center we put it through its environmental testing that it will see inside the rocket which is always the most violent it will see at Goddard. So vibration testing and acoustic testing will look at the sound levels you'll see inside the rocket.

We did not have a chamber big enough at Goddard to actually do the cryogenic testing. So back even before I came on the program, they made a deal with Johnson Space Center to take a chamber that was developed for the Apollo era, refurb it into the world's largest cryogenic chamber. And that's where we were able to take the telescope and instruments down there, deploy the mirrors, and run through a battery of testing at cryogenic temperatures to prove that it works, to prove that we can focus the telescope, to prove that the instruments work at that range, integrated into the telescope. That was a really big test. And right in the middle of it was Hurricane Harvey.

So it became even more challenging because we basically kept the Otis safe over a span of two or three days when it was really bad. And we kept the people who were at Johnson there. We had cots brought in and stuff. And the folks who were in their hotels, you stay in your hotel. And once it passed and you were able to get out again, we were able to start the testing again. The thing there that I'm most proud of, all the time I tell folks, besides the fact that the test was a big success, was that the folks, when they rested up, they went back out into the community and helped, volunteered in the community to help the community out recover

from the program, which I just saw was outstanding. But that's how we tested the Otis, and then the Otis came out here. Now you have the bottom piece, the lower part, we call the spacecraft element, that is the spacecraft bus, so it has all the electronics, this solar communications equipment. And the Sunshield, that could go through testing here. So it went through its same type of environmental testing, VIBE, acoustics, and then into a thermal vac chamber to run its testing. But once you put those two pieces together, you can't test this in a chamber anymore. So the way you overcome that, this project is very intensive in mathematical modeling. So starting down at the very low levels of components, we build mathematical models. The results of those models are compared to the results of the testing.

You get them to match and make your adjustments to the models. And now you start building up and you build your models up. start building up and you build your models up to the point that in the end you've got there's about a dozen models we can use that can accurately predict the performance of JVST on orbit without having to go through a fully integrated telescope or observatory environmental testing. Electrically we could test, we tested the entire telescope electrically, but it was really the environmental testing. And we're going to talk a little bit later with your colleague, Begonia Villa, who has been involved with a lot of that testing, I'm told. You mentioned a hurricane. That may seem minor compared to what we hopefully are coming out of now, a pandemic.

How did that affect the project? That was very challenging. From my standpoint, my counterpart at Northrop Grumman, Scott Willoughby's standpoint, the most important resource on this program are the people. You can say it's time and you can say it's money, but none of those do any good if you don't have the people that do the job. So when the pandemic really started and things started shutting down in March of 2020. We, I see California shut down, I think on a Wednesday. So we suspended operations and I told everybody to go home. We had to figure out what we were going to do. We wanted folks to go home and figure out, you know, how you're going to cope with this. We had about 30 to 40 folks from Goddard Space Flight Center out here. We got them home. A few of them volunteered to stay.

And through the weekend, what we decided to do at that point, we were running two 10-hour shifts a day, six days a week. We made the decision to cut that back to one 10-hour shift a day, five days a week. So we slowed things down to allow folks to really be able to cope with the issues you have to deal with at home. We had to develop protocols to bring the folks back in here to work. I mean, when you're in the clean room, like you have folks in there now, you're pretty safe. You're pretty low risk as far as ever. Yeah, we're looking at people, masks, bunny suits, and very clean air.

Yes, yeah. But getting in there, they have to go through a gowning room and such. So we started limiting the number of people in the gowning room. Going through the air showers one person at a time. That also slowed the process down. Luckily, we're in Southern California, so if people lined up to get in outside, most times it wasn't raining. If it was raining, they could stay in their cars and then come in. So it increased the amount of time to get in and the time to take breaks and go out,

because once you go in, you don't stay in there 10 hours. You take breaks, you have lunch breaks, whatever. So that has slowed down the process. And we kept those protocols in place through the end of last year. And for the most part, they're still in place now. There are still some of those protocols in place. That was really probably the biggest impact here at Northrop Grumman. The other big facility we have is the Space Telescope Science Institute

up at the campus of John Hopkins. They basically closed down and everybody worked from home. Last summer, we began to bring back not so much the folks that worked there except the ones that support operations, but letting some of our folks back in, their flight ops team back in, because we needed to start testing with the spacecraft from the control center last summer. And that's gone well.

We have gotten better and better with the protocols there. As things have gotten better, the protocols get a little less to the point where now we're running full-up mission rehearsals up there. And we just completed an eight day one where we broke it up into the first day was a countdown from l minus six hours up through a solar array deployment we did three days of sunshield deployments and during these times as much as we want them to run smooth the team running their mission rehearsal throws anomalies at us and you have to be able to respond to those anomalies

and exercise what I always call our toolbox, maybe think outside that toolbox and how you resolve some of these if we have an issue on orbit. And then we spent a day, I think, deploying mirrors and then doing our wafer and sensing, which is focusing the mirror, as well as doing some instrument commissioning exercises. And we have another one of those coming up in August. That's a full two weeks. To paraphrase the person who said, you know, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? I guess I would say,

how do you get to a Lagrange point? Practice, practice, practice. Practice, yes. Test, test, test. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Any idea how big the team has been? how many people have contributed to this project? I mean, we're seeing some of them down there on the floor right now, largely Northrop Grumman technicians, of course. But not just the number of people, but the variety of skills that have gone into creating this observatory. Well, a couple things. One, when you actually look on the floor,

that is an integrated Northrop Grumman NASA team that's out there. We are a fully integrated INT team, so you almost always see a mix out there. You may not know it, but there's always a mixture out there. Over the years, if you go back 20 years to develop this mission, we have taken a very rough guess at over 10,000 people have worked on it. It's not all engineers, and it's not all scientists. We have our technicians. We have the machinists.

You've got other support folks such as contracts folks, lawyers. They're all part of that team that all work together. So there's all different skill levels and talents that go into constructing something like this. When I go out to schools, and I like talking to elementary school kids, so at some point back when we get back kind of normal, you can do that again. I always tell them, if you're really interested in space, we tell everybody, right, math, science. I emphasize English because you better be able to communicate your ideas to folks. But that's not the only thing you can do. If you can't get, you know, not everybody's a mathematician, but there's lots of other

things you can do. Everything from a machinist to a graphic artist to financial people, business folks. You have, I'm going to get people mad at me if I leave their different things out. It's like the Academy Awards. Don't leave anybody out. Yeah, but it's almost any kind of job you can think of, you can probably tailor it to be working in the aerospace industry and working on a satellite.

I got one for you, which was absolutely delightful when I made that earlier visit here to Northrop Grumman. At that time, there were seamstresses sewing the sunshield. Yeah, we don't use that term, but were seamstresses sewing the sunshield. Yeah. We don't use that term, but it is like that. Anytime you want to need, whether it's the sunshield itself was manufactured by a company called Nexolve in Huntsville, Alabama. When you look at the sunshield and it's deployed, it's about the size of, we always say, the size of a tennis court. Each layer is made up of 50 individual pieces and they are

thermally stitched together. But going back to what you mentioned about people just sewing things together, there's a lot of thermal blanketing on this satellite, almost on any satellite, but especially on this satellite. And that is done in a shop where you literally are using sewing machines and such to stitch things together and cut things out, the patterns. And that all goes into installing all of our thermal insulation, and it's all different shapes and sizes. So, yeah, it's just another example of the type of career you can have that still gets you involved with aerospace. It has been, as we said, a long, hard road, some bumps along the way, so close now. And this is a question I'll probably ask your colleagues who will be coming in as well. What step in the deployment of this

telescope is going to give you the greatest amount of relief once it's complete, once it's in place? Lots of times I just tell folks, have you seen the video? That should give you enough nightmares right there. But it is probably the most complex deployment is the Sunshield. It's got, let's see if I can get these numbers, 1,300 feet of cable. It has 107 different release devices. It's either 400 or 500 pulley assemblies. It is extraordinarily complex.

And just watching when they deploy here in the cleaning room, you can get that sense because you have all this other ground support equipment to do zero-g offloading because we designed it to operate in a zero-g environment, not in a one-g environment, so you need to take that into account. Sure. So it is a very complex deployment. That's probably the one you worry about the most. But we tell folks, you know, I think it was one of the Mars landers, they had the seven and a half minutes of terror. Yeah, I was going to bring that up. We call it, our equivalent is two and a half weeks of high anxiety.

You beat me to that comparison. Once it's up there, once you've seen first light, and those hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of whom I've had on this show, talking about how much they're looking forward to this telescope beginning to do its work. and it's the sort of thing anybody can find easily on the web, of just how big a jump this is going to be over the Hubble Space Telescope, or for that matter, any other telescope that we've put up there in space, like the Spitzer. We'll do the comparison of the Hubble, because that's the one everybody likes to do the comparison to. Sure. So our primary mirror is about seven times the size of Hubble's primary mirror. So right away you see the huge increase in collecting power. We also have detectors that are more sensitive. When you combine those things together,

the number I hear from our science folks, because I'm not a scientist, is that we're probably going to be about 100 times better than Hubble. Now you combine that with the fact that we are an infrared telescope. So that's right. That's like one of the really big differences is why you see the mirror coated in gold because gold is more sensitive to infrared. With beryllium behind there. We could have done this whole conversation just talking about those mirrors. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, that was in one of our big technology developments. You combine all those things together and you look at what some of the science goals that we have, whether it's going back and look at the very beginnings of the universe and how the first galaxies and stars were formed. The one I get a big kick out of is looking at exoplanets. As a kid, I got a telescope, I may be in the sixth grade.

Me too. And, you know, the first thing you look at is the moon. The next thing you start looking at is trying to look at, you know, Jupiter and Saturn, that kind of stuff. And I've always been fascinated by that. So now with our spectrographs and the sensitivity that we have, we'll be able to look at some of these exoplanets and look if they have the basic elements for life. And I always put the caveat on it, as we know it. Yes, right. Because we think we may know everything, but time and time again, we're proven wrong. All through history. Just last week on this show, we were talking to somebody about exactly this topic

and how even remote telescopes like this may be able to help as we figure out ways to recognize even life as we don't know it. Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's going to be really cool. And that's what I'm really looking forward to as I'm sitting on a beach having a drink after all this. You obviously have to interact with, I mean, you've got a whole bunch of scientists who are project scientists on this project. But all those others around the world who you must be hearing from. And I just wonder about if you've thought about how it's going to feel to know the kind of science that you've enabled them to do once Webb is doing what it will. From my personal standpoint, from my career, because after this I'm going to probably retire, I started on Hubble, 21 years old, by a few weeks.

And the finish of my career managing JWST is just mind-blowing. It's like I came full circle. And so I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of that. You know, looking back in my career, when we, after the first servicing mission, and we got everything straightened out with the mirror, the type of science that Hubble has done has been amazing. To look at how now JWST is going to go back We got everything straightened out with the mirror. The type of science that Hubble has done has been amazing.

To look at how now JVST is going to go back and take those same books that Hubble rewrote with its science, we're going to be rewriting again, is just amazing, and it's very gratifying. There are people right now, I've talked to some of them, who are beginning to design and even propose the telescopes that will someday, could be 20 years from now, be the follow-on to this, just as it is the follow-on to the Hubble. What's your advice to those people? Be conservative when you're starting to try to figure out how much it costs and how long it's going to take to build.

It's important not to be optimistic. I like to consider myself, I'm an optimistic realist. And even then, there's the unknown unknowns that can happen and burn you along the way. Try to apply, if a telescope has some of the technologies we have, for example, the segmented mirrors, try to apply lessons learned from JVST to that. You know, there's other things that they'll have different technologies that you just can't apply the lessons learned to. It's just like we couldn't apply lessons learned from Hubble to JVST. But it really is for making sure you think everything through. And it's very challenging. People come

to me all the time. they talk about, well, it was originally a billion dollars, you know, and now it's nine billion dollars. What you have to do is come out here and take a look at it or look at pictures of it, then understand that it's, like I mentioned before, 10,000 people have worked on this over the years. You can't do the math to make a billion dollars work. The complexities of it, we developed 10 new technologies for this telescope. That takes time, effort, and money. So you've got to have the reserves in there to be able to do that because it may not go smooth the first time.

You may have to – typically it's an iterative process, right? We're making progress, but, yeah, it's not quite there yet to meet requirements. You've got to do it again. That all takes time. I mean, the mirrors are a prime example of technology development. What it took to go from a chunk of a beryllium to this mirror you see now is amazing. The number of people that were involved in that. The analogy we like to use, if you took one segment of the mirror, and a segment is about the size of a good-sized coffee table. If you took that segment before you polished it and then blew it up to the size of the continental U.S.

and had your imperfections as the Rocky Mountains, when we finish the polishing of that, the Rocky Mountains are about an inch high. So it shows you the level of the type of work we had to do. When they did their initial polishing, they then went down to, I think it was maybe five segments at a time or four at a time, whatever, down to Marshall Space Flight Center. We went to a cryogenic chamber there. You bring them down to the cryo chambers,

and when you do temperatures, and when you do that, you're going to get imperfections in the mirror. Sure. You have to measure those imperfections, and let's say one of the imperfections turns into a peak. You take it back to the polishing factory. You take that peak, and you now make it a valley. The peak that's no longer there once you take it out of the cryo chamber.

Now you make a valley. Now when you go back longer there once you take it out of the cryo chamber. Now you make a valley. Now when you go back into the chamber the second time around to test it, that peak is now flat, right, because you compensate it for that. And the same thing with the valleys that you may have seen. So that's an iterative process we had to go through and get developed, and it was very neat technology to go do that. It sounds simple, but it really took a lot of effort, a lot of people, a long time

to figure out how we get these perfect mirrors. On the back of each mirror are six actuators, so we can make adjustments as part of focusing when we get on orbit. Because when we get on orbit, you basically start out with 18 images that you want to get down, focus it to one image. But we can make all sorts of adjustments on this, even in orbit. You can move the mirrors up and down, back and forth, in and out. You can even change the shape a little bit. So that allows us a tremendous amount of flexibility over time to make adjustments to that mirror when we need to. Great example.

What's that saying? Do great things? Do great things or keep it simple stupid. Both applicable. Yeah, keeping it simple stupid is a hard one to apply here yeah sure complexities involved but uh and we go out and we do great things and but to do great things it takes time energy a lot of smart people and you learn along the way yep and some things happen that uh probably are going to pay off for future projects yeah i mean there's always lessons learned

just in the development of it that you can pay off. And there's very simple lessons learned that people all should be doing. There shouldn't even be lessons learned. And that is something that's this complex. And I tell folks this all the time. You tend to want to focus on the really, really hard things because that's where you know your challenges are. What can happen is you can miss a simple mistake.

And so the lesson, you've got to look across everything. You've got to focus on the simple things just as much as you have to focus on the really hard, complex things. And, you know, the example I use all the time is when the spacecraft element came out of acoustics. Everybody heard about you look on the floor and we found loose nuts and screws. It was very simple what happened. North of the drawing sent it down to the manufacturer. Typically on a drawing, you always have a specification that says for a screw going into a lock nut, for that lock nut to engage,

you have to have so many threads basically proud of the lock nut. That spec was inadvertently left off, so the manufacturer was more random that it was done, and that was the result. And they started to back out over time, and then we went to the acoustics environment that was like the straw that broke the camel's back. And that cost us a lot of time to go back. And so it's the simple things like that, and after that we went back, we audited thousands and thousands of drawings, all sorts of other checks that we went through to make sure we didn't have that issue anyplace else on the satellite. But this is exactly how the process is supposed to work.

Because anything this complex, you're going to run into things like that no matter how carefully you are. But it was caught here instead of discovering it out there. Oh know they always say this is the reason why you test is to find stuff and that's what we did. The frustrating thing is it was something that was simple and that and I can understand why all the critics of JBSD get frustrated because it was something that should have been caught and we take lessons learned from that all along the way. As we've gone through and we found other things, we do very heavy auditing. Everything from going out and checking bolts to going looking at drawings to looking at going back and double checking test results and so on. We do a lot of auditing to make sure we never have any problems

when we get on audit. I'm thinking of you as this is your crowning achievement and then going into retirement and hopefully continuing to visit those elementary schools, as you said. Yesterday I told my 5-year-old grandson that I'm going to be going to see the James Webb Space Telescope. And he said, because he's already a space geek, can I come? Yeah, that's pretty cool. My grandson's not quite 2 yet, so he doesn't quite grasp it. But, yeah, for little kids, I mean, it's pretty cool. My grandson's not quite two yet, so he doesn't quite grasp it. But, yeah, for little kids, I mean, it's going to be amazing. This is the next generation's telescope.

The five-year-old might actually get to work on the one after this. But, you know, the kids now that are middle school, high school, and college that want to go into astrophysics, this is what they want to work with. that want to go into astrophysics, this is what they want to work with. Best of success, Phil, as this amazing telescope observatory is packed up, sent down to French Guiana, and counts down to its launch to doing perhaps the greatest astronomy, astronomical work that has ever been done by a telescope. Where will you be for the launch? Launch, I'll be in French Guiana.

So I'll be on console down there. I'll get down there a week, two weeks ahead of time because we have some reviews down there that we finish up. The day after launch, I'll then fly back up to Baltimore and head up to the Institute for our commissioning. It takes us about 30 days to get out to L2. During that 30-day time frame is when we do all our deployments. Once we do that, we start the wavefront sensing. We have to cool the telescope down, commission the instruments. It is a jam-packed full six months of commissioning, but the end result is going to be spectacular. Thank you, Bill. Can't wait. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I can't wait either. Bill Oakes is the James Webb Space Telescope Project Manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. We'll meet Bill's colleague, Dr. Begonia Vila, after this break.

I hope you'll stay with us. Hi again. Did you catch my big announcement a couple of weeks ago? Even if you didn't, you may have noticed the change. Planetary Radio is now commercial-free. We're very glad to have made this transition, but it does leave us short of the funds those ads used to bring in. You can tell where this is going. I hope you'll go to planetary.org slash join. Becoming a member of the Planetary Society is the best way to support all of our great work. But did you know that you can also provide direct support for Planetary Radio? Go to planetary.org slash donate and scroll down

to the picture of Cassini Project scientists Linda Spilker and me touching the geysers emerging from a model of Saturn's moon Enceladus. My colleagues and I will be grateful for your gift in any amount and we also look forward to welcoming you as a new member of the Society at Astra. We also look forward to welcoming you as a new member of the Society at Astra. Spanish-born Begonia Vila is a key instrument systems engineer for the James Webb Space Telescope. Like Bill Oakes, she was making another visit to the Webb from the Goddard Space Flight Center when she climbed the steps to the clean room gallery where I had also talked with Bill. Dr. Vila, Begonia, thank you very much for joining us here with this absolutely thrilling view in front of us. Now, this is new for me being in the presence.

You still, after all these years, feel that excitement? Indeed. Thank you for having me. It's always an exciting moment. I have been with the project for quite a while. I remember delivering the flight instruments. That was exciting. Seeing I have been with the project for quite a while. I remember delivering the flight instruments. That was exciting. Seeing them put together in the isomer structure, that was an awesome moment doing the cryo testing. Then seeing the mirrors, each of the individual mirrors are assembled. Seeing that first picture that a lot of us at Goddard saw those mirrors open for the first time. Super exciting. And then coming here to Northrop, seeing the sun shield, the integration together, and now any phase is super exciting, and it's always a wonderful moment

when we get to do what we are doing. This is as thrilling for me as when I've gone to JPL, put on the bunny suit, you stand in front of curiosity, you stand in front of perseverance. There's a bit of anxiousness as well because until it's up there getting first light, so much still has to go just right, right? And you've been a big part of making sure that it will go just right. Yes. As you know, it's going to be very far away, four times the distance of the moon. So we have had to do a lot of testing on the ground to make sure it will deploy and operate as expected. I think we are all feeling the excitement now because we are almost there. I think this week here we are finishing two of the most important electrical tests that we have to do.

In fact, today I am here supporting one event where we induce a fault and we show that everything saves and shuts down as it should. But anyway, we are very close to going to the French IANA, doing the testing there, and then doing the launch will be exciting. But that's not the end of it. Of course, then we have about six months of commissioning. We have to deploy all the components, align those 18 mirrors. The first time we take a picture of a star in orbit, we'll see 18 stars. Each of the mirrors behaves as a mirror. So a lot of work with the actuators on the back

to make it behave as a single mirror. And then we have to turn each of the instruments to the calibration. So I think it's going to be so exciting even after the launch during all that time until we say, we are ready. Here is James Webb. Go and use it. So very, very cool. here is James Webb, go and use it. So very, very cool. Very much the same process that all big new telescopes have to go through. The big difference, of course, being this is going to happen in the vacuum and cold of space with no human hands on it. Correct. Yes. Every time you launch something into space, you follow certain processes. We all have to do it, right? You do some ambient functional to make sure things work. You have to do vibration and acoustics testing to make sure what you're launching survives

kind of the worst part of the journey, which is that launch on the rocket where it will be shaken and hear these loud noises. But then you have to duplicate the conditions that instrument will see on orbit. In our case, an infrared telescope operating very cold. So that's why we had to do the testing in the cryo chamber at Goddard and the cryo chamber in Houston to duplicate the vacuum and the coldness. This goes to 40 Kelvin. And that was a challenge in itself. A lot of cold telescopes go to 80 Kelvin with nitrogen.

To go to 40, you have to add helium, and that's a more complicated process. And of course, every time you cool down this big instrument with so many components, you have to watch it very careful that everything is cooling down as it should. So lots of work to do those tests and it's something that we'll monitor on orbit as well. How does that cool down go and make sure everything behaves as we need it to get there? 40 degrees Kelvin, of course, 40 degrees on the Kelvin scale, much like centigrade, but we're talking about 40 degrees above absolute zero. Very, very cold and in vacuum during that testing. Did that testing give you the confidence that once this big spacecraft, because it is a spacecraft, gets up there,

it's going to do what we need it to do. Yes, you have very good points there. Vacuum, which is different. On the ground, we have to do a special testing to simulate that vacuum. But then that coldness, it's so cold. We cannot build a telescope at those temperatures. We have to build them at ambient temperatures. And I think, as everybody knows, when you put something in the freezer its properties change so that's true for this telescope as well the properties of the materials will change and

things will shift a little bit so you have to make sure I build it at ambient knowing when it gets cold it's going to go there and that's where it needs to be. So lots of team effort, modeling, and then demonstration and validation. Those cryo tests were critical. The one at Goddard did all the instruments. Of course, you have to simulate the sky. We had to have the stars and we had to simulate the sunshield. We didn't have it. And the mirrors, we didn't have them. And then the testing at Houston, a much bigger chamber that we needed because the mirrors are so big, and that allowed us to check everything a bit better together and also validate the process we are going to use on orbit that we mentioned before of aligning those mirrors. We had a fake star, and we could see how to do that process.

So I think we have done as much as we can. We have done a very thorough test campaign on the James Webb to convince ourselves we are ready. We are ready when we launch it for it to behave as it should. Simulating the sky or simulating stars, which never occurred to me. Of course you would want to do that. How was that done? Right.

That's something which is a science project in itself. You have to have another instrument that's going to make light of different stars. You have to have the focus of those stars similar to what the James Webb will have. You have to think about the light of those stars. So the instruments are picking up light in the infrared. So a big effort to generate that optical support equipment that also needs to be tested in that chamber before you do it for real to make sure it behaves as expected. So always

you have all these secondary activities that you need to do to demonstrate what you need to. And I can mention, because we are looking at the window here. I wish listeners had the view that we have now as technicians surround the base of the telescope, and a couple of guys on forklifts who have been pushed into the guts, into the interior of the telescope, just below the mirrors. Just amazing to see this happening. And I've only now noticed some of the techs sitting off to the side watching as this takes place. Indeed, it's a very skilled team. You need different skills here. I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for going inside there because it's such a critical portion of the fly hardware. They need to know exactly what they are doing. It's a very detailed and careful operation that they do there. We have obviously tested how to deploy the mirrors and how to deploy the sunshield at ambient too.

But if people think about it, we don't have the zero gravity. So I cannot really just open the mirrors and open the sunshield. That will damage it. So you have to do a very careful, again, ground support equipment that will offload the weight of what you are deploying without affecting what you're trying to test to demonstrate you can open it safely and you can close it safely. So again, a lot of around work that's needed from the team to be able to demonstrate and validate all the operations for flight. to be able to demonstrate and validate all the operations for flight. I also think of what it must have taken to integrate all of these components. I mean, enough of a challenge developing each of them.

But as we know from other spacecraft, other projects that we've talked about on this show, the integration, until you actually install something and see that, you know, the holes that bolts are supposed to go through actually line up, but maybe more importantly, that the electronics all work together. I mean, is this also something that you've been a part of? Yes, I mainly work on the operations of the instruments. So yes, I have been involved throughout to either develop or support the testing when it happens. And what you're saying is totally correct. Each component is tested at its level.

If we start at the beginning, an instrument was tested wherever it was built, in Canada, in Europe, here in the USA. Each of those teams tested the instrument and did the testing we mentioned before. They did functional testing, they did vibration, acoustics, and cryo testing. And they delivered it saying, this is good. We think it's good. Now you're going to put them all together. And it's what you say, how do you know you put them together correctly? How do you know all the bolts and all the pointing is good? Well, you have to do the testing again. Functional, vibration, acoustics, cryo. And that happens all the way through.

The sunshield had to do the same. The mirrors had to do the same. And now when we finally came to Northrop, putting everything together, which you can see videos, I'm sure, online and on the JWST website, how cool it is to put the mirrors with the instruments, with the sunshield and the spacecraft bus but then we had to repeat it all over again vibrations functional acoustics we couldn't go cold with there is no chamber on the earth as big enough to fit this beautiful instrument but we did as

much as we could we are still doing it at ambient to demonstrate that nothing is broken we did put it together correctly and it functions as it should. Something I've just remembered. I mean, I've talked to so many scientists who are waiting for the data to start flowing from this telescope, and, of course, you know, hundreds more around the world. One of them who's been deeply involved with the project, who I won't identify, I asked her, what are you most worried about, you know, when it has to be deployed? And she said it's that secondary mirror that has to lock down into place high above that segmented primary mirror.

And that once that happens, then she's going to feel so relieved. I wonder, I mean, what's the thing that's going to happen that will really give you that sense of, wow, okay, this is all going to do exactly what we want? Yes, I think that is a very good point. I think we're all watching for sure at the sunshield. We know the sunshield has to open and deploy for us to cool down. There is some redundancy there. The sunshield has five layers. We can do with four. So is some redundancy there. The sunshield has five layers.

We can do with four. So there is redundancy built in. But then the second one is the one that was mentioned. We need that secondary mirror to go down. If it doesn't, the light is not going to get to the instruments. And obviously, there are other events that are happening in parallel, you know, other deployments that we need. But if we get to that secondary sun shield,

what's left after that are the two winds of the mirrors that are folded. But we have done analysis of what will happen if the winds don't deploy. I think providing we can get light into the telescope and it's cold, we can see a path forward then, no? To get the data, turn the instruments, and start working with it. So it will be challenging if things don't work depending on what it is, but I do agree. Once we get to that secondary, we can see the path forward. You mentioned that you've been a part of the project for many years, beginning even before you came to NASA,

when you worked for a Canadian company that was doing some work with this, which brings up the international nature of this project, Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency, NASA, of course. Is that something, I mean, have you interacted with representatives from those other agencies who are also contributing to the telescope. Yes, indeed. For me, it is one of the more pleasurable between many parts of this project. I was working with the Canadian agency. I continued working with them when I came to work for NASA. And because of my role as an instrument overall coordinator and deputy for operations, I work with all the instrument teams. And it's a relationship that has been wonderful from the first cryo that we did at Goddard.

We had three cryos at Goddard, lots of ambient functionals, the cryo at Houston, all the ambient functionals here. I feel it's like part of a big family. It's a pleasure. You know, you get to know the different team members. We all have different personalities, of course. And I always joke a little bit, you know, the stereotypes for the different, you know, how a German person is or a Spanish or a Canadian. And it's obviously not true. There is a variety. But you always feel there is a little bit of that in all of us.

And it's truly a pleasure to develop this friendship and this working relationship with this team. And we still have the six months of commissioning together, but very good friendships made and great work together. And I think it's a very important thing for science that teaches all of us that we can really work together for a common good, you know, independently of many other things that we put in the way sometimes. So it's one of the things we like best about exploring space. It has become something that in general nowadays, no one nation does entirely on its own. Indeed.

These big projects that answer these critical questions for all of us, for humanity, you cannot do them alone anymore. And it's not good to do them alone. I mean, it's good to, we're all looking for the same answers, the same knowledge. So it's truly a pleasure. I think that's a wonderful thing on the James Webb to have this mixed team working together. I know that you also do a lot of STEM activities, outreach activities, in part relying on your fluency in both Spanish and English.

And I just wonder how much a part of a sort of your mission in life it is to share what you do and to share the thrill that we get looking out there. Yes, I love doing STEM and outreach events, not only to share, obviously, James Webb. I think it's a telescope for everybody. think it's a telescope for everybody. And I think on any subject, you know, astrophysics, anything that we work on, it's not a specialty. I think everybody can understand it. Everybody can get excited about it. So I love having a little bit of a part in engaging everybody and not thinking, oh, I could not do that. I could not understand that, which is not correct. So I really enjoy it on both. And it's different, the Spanish and English. I love both. It gives you a different feeling. And it's a great part of what I enjoy in my job. Where will you be when that launch takes place in French Guiana? Any chance you're going to be down there?

Well, I'm going to be in French Guiana for the functional testing. I am not sure yet if I'll be there for the very end. But then for sure I know where I'm going to be for the next six months, which is in the Mission Control Center in Baltimore in the Instruments Control Room. So both, I'll get to experience a little bit of both. And yeah, I can't wait. I think it's a wonderful ending of a journey. So very looking forward to it. In some ways, even though you've been at this for 15 years, the excitement, the best of it is still to come, obviously. Thank you, Begonia. It's been delightful talking with you and best of success

with this big telescope. Thank you. It has been my pleasure. Thank you for having me. NASA Goddard Instrument Systems Engineer Begonia Vila. Also in town during my Northrop Grumman visit was Greg Robinson. Greg directs the James Webb Space Telescope Program in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA's Washington headquarters. Greg spent 11 years at Goddard, earlier in his NASA career. As you'll hear, that was just one of his many assignments. Greg, welcome to Planetary Radio. Great to add you to this very talented group that I've been able to talk to today as we look down at the James Webb Space Telescope. Welcome. Well, thank you. I'm really glad to be here. We certainly appreciate what you all do and what you do for NASA and the space business. So I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, well, you're the guys who

give us something to talk about. So thank you as well. Speaking of NASA, you've been all over the place. Deputy Chief Engineer, Deputy Center Director at the Glenn Research Center, Deputy Associate Administrator for Programs in the Directorate that you're still part of, the Science Mission Directorate, headed by Thomas Zerbukun, who's been heard on this show. You seem to be sort of a utility player or a utility leader. Well, sometimes you have to get the base hit. Sometimes you have to steal a base. And sometimes you have to get the home run. I've generally gone where they've asked me to go to to make a contribution to the agency and I hope

like to think I've made contributions in all those areas. Of course each experience builds on the next right and so that's kind of made me the what I like to call the whole person in space. I haven't said this before, but probably the right person for this job at the right time. Well, that's good. I think you have a perfect right to say that. You know better than most people that the Science Mission Directorate, you folks deal with what? Something like a hundred different projects, missions, and so on. This machine out here, the Webb, it's just one of those, but it's certainly one that has gotten a lot of attention. Rightfully so. Yeah, we have, depending on which day you

count, 114, 115 missions in various stages of formulation, development, and operations on orbit. So it's a huge portfolio crossing all of the science themes. But Webb is the mother of them all. And I often say Webb is our Apollo on the science side. It has that kind of cachet. The world knows about Hubble for 30 plus years. And this is 100 times better than Hubble, if you could just wrap your brain around that. And I'm still trying. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around just actually being in its presence out there. Tell me about your job now, which is pretty much devoted to this telescope. Both arms were twisted just over three years ago to take this job. I was happy with my last job.

And this was around the time we'd just run into a few glitches on launch day and a few other issues. So I'm the program director. I think you've talked to Bill Oakes. He's the project manager out of Goddard. And I often say that's where the heavy lifting takes place, right? As you mentioned, a utility player. My job is to ensure that the project is doing what it needs to do to be successful, to be the interface to SMD or the SMD lead in this case,

and also to manage up to the ninth floor, to the administrative suite, and a lot of our stakeholder communications with the Hill and OMB and others. A lot of interfacing between people with different interests, different skills, different jobs. Absolutely, and that's what makes it tough because we are who we are personality-wise, right? And we have to deal with all of these different interests and our stress interests with quotes. But that's what makes it fun. And to do this for this mission makes it easy as well. We've talked a little bit with Begoña Vila and with Bill Oaks about how big this team has been from so many different agencies around the world as well.

Sure, the engineering challenges are huge and the integration of all that engineering, but just the people involved, making all of them mesh so well, sounds like that is really a big part of what you do. Well, it's really a big part of it. Again, the heavy lifting takes place from Goddard, from Bill's team. We've had several thousand people working on this over the years, engineers, technicians, hundreds of scientists across the globe. So a huge supply chain with our contractors and sub-tier suppliers. huge supply chain with our contractors and sub-tier suppliers. It's kind of tiered. Over certain times, you deal with different pieces of that supply chain. It's almost compartmentalized as it builds up. That helps a little bit. But certainly a large team, really, really smart

people. And it's all about the people. And the key is learning how to make these people and these organizations work together in harmony. That's the key, but that's the hard part as well. And it can be fun when it's successful, and I think we're in that direction. Do you interact with the scientists on the project and actually scientists who aren't on the project? Yes, I do. On a day-to-day basis, the program scientist, Eric Smith, deals with the science community day-to-day, with interface with the Goddard science team, with the project scientists.

And, of course, he works through the Space Telescope Science Institute, does a lot of the mission operations planning. That's where a lot of scientists play into that. So I deal with it on a gross level, top level. But day-to-day, Eric is that primary interface. Because you're at HQ, right? Correct. And Eric is as well. I have a very small team there, rightfully so. So he does a lot of that heavy lifting on the science side. He is a scientist as well. Chief scientist. He's now chief scientist of NASA, of course, Jim Green. We got to know him when he was the head of the Planetary Science Division. Is that also somebody who drops in now and then and has things to say about the development of the James Webb Space Telescope?

Absolutely. So Jim stays engaged in everything that we're doing in the Science Mission Directorate, and certainly for James Webb. in the Science Mission Directorate, and certainly for James Webb and the whole astrophysics side, he stays engaged in that because he helps kind of set the vision for science across the agency and the interfaces across the different mission directorates, whether it's part of human space flight or aeronautics or space technology. So he helps set a vision across those. He doesn't do any of the implementation execution. So yes, he's still heavily engaged in the science mission directorate and in astrophysics. How do you and others make sure that as this gigantic engineering project comes together, that your sights are kept on the science

that it's going to be doing for all of those scientists? So it's easy to forget about the science. Certainly in the early stages, after you get through all the requirements and everything of what the mission needs to do, then it really shifts to engineering, best practices and requirements and standards and so on. So for many years in this case, the heavy focus on engineering and development, as it should be, but we often like to keep the science in the forefront of what we're doing because at the end of the day, it's all about the science. It's kind of interesting, and a lot of engagements I do now, most of the engagement and questions are around science. Two years ago, they were all about, what are you doing to get this thing ready? So as we get closer,

the science interest is growing exponentially like it did prior to actually building this thing. Do you foresee a time, and we hear all the time about all kinds of projects, including rovers on Mars, about the tension, friendly tension, if things are going properly, between the scientists and the engineers? Because the scientists always want to push the envelope a little bit. Yes, that's a good health attention. You definitely want to push the envelope for science. You don't want to do the same old stuff. Otherwise, you're not exploring, right? Yeah.

Engineers want to get it just right, the best system possible. And sometimes that costs more, takes more time. And the scientist says, well, I can give up that small second or third level requirement if we just get the thing done, right? So that's a good tension to get it in space so they can start getting science versus taking more time to add a little more robustness to it. It's a delicate balance, but that's what we do. That's really at the heart of development versus the mission objectives. I'm going to make a wild guess here and say that once this telescope is up there doing its job,

there may be more scientists trying to get their minutes or hours or days of time making use of it than possibly any other scientific instrument in history. I may be exaggerating, but it's probably not by much. I'm guessing that the Space Telescope Science Institute has to deal with that for the most part. But is that also something that you have involvement with, figuring out, okay, this is how we're going to make this equitable? So that's actually delegated to the Institute to manage so beyond the the EROs the early release and the guaranteed science observations we have these these cycle

general observation so we compete that and back in April we just selected close to 300 proposals across the globe and they touch in many areas of astrophysics. So nearly 300 in our first cycle, and we do this cycle every year. And the competition is pretty fierce. I assume, even though you're probably happy to let the Institute handle a lot of this, one of the jobs of headquarters is to make sure that there is some kind of a fair process in place for making sure everybody gets a shot, or at least as many people who deserve it get a shot. Absolutely. So the Institute, they have a lot of history. They've done this

before, and not just for Webb, and they've done a great job. And they've actually instituted some fairness in the process themselves. They have a process that tries to reduce bias. They have these blind evaluations. You don't know exactly who's submitted the proposal, as an example. So you don't know if it's a male or female. You don't know which country they're from. You don't know which institution. All of those things that can bring in bias, right? And I can tell you in this process, they really selected a really, really good group. So they're always looking for ways to make it fairer. Normally, they will present those ideas to us at NASA headquarters and, you know, tweak here or there, but they're pretty good at what they do. So with three years and change, you're the newbie among the people that I've talked to

today. Bill, who's, you know, was on Hubble and then now for 10 and a half years has been project manager, Begonia, who actually had some exposure to this project before she came to NASA. But you've had experience on so many other teams working on so many other projects. What are your impressions about this one and the team behind it and just how well this is coming together? Well, first of all, this is extremely complex. I've touched a lot of missions.

We often talk about Webb is special, unique, and different, and it is. I can tell you that. We've never done anything this complex, this grand. So it is different. We have a really smart team, people dedicated, been on it for years, 20 years, maybe approaching 30 when you go back to the concept stage. Yeah. So when I talk about people crying when it launches, they've cooked this baby,

and they're going to see it go off to college. And it's going to be a lot of joy as we do as parents, right? But there are a few tears as well, and we will see a lot of that. So, yes, I'm the new guy. I've been on just over three years. I may shed a tear as well because I've also embraced it. I hope that those of you who shed those tears will be smiling through them and looking forward to that first light because as we've heard, getting it up there to L2, that Lagrange point, there'll still be a lot of work

to do as it deploys and gets ready to do astronomy. We have six months of commissioning, as you heard. So it's a lot of work after we launch. The next big phase is getting all these deployments out and getting everything stable and getting those early images to help us refine the commissioning. And then those first, what we call releasable images, will really be the big day. And that's when the elation will overpower all of us. And

I think every day I come out of the house now, I'm going to look up to the heavens after this thing gives us the first images. And I think a lot of people will do that. I'm not inside the project like you are, but I cannot wait for that time to come. For those of you who are part of this team, I hope that you will be that proud and more because it really is going to be, knock it on the table here, a tremendous accomplishment. You're going to have a long line of people behind you and in front of you who will be really happy when this thing is launched and commissioned and start operations. People around the globe will be waiting for this, and they will be quite happy, I believe. We think the physics books will be rewritten based on James Webb. So it's a really

big deal. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you, Greg. Thank you. Greg Robinson is the James Webb Space Telescope Program Director for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. I'm grateful to him, Director for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. I'm grateful to him, Begonia Vila, and Bill Oakes for taking time to talk with us. And I'm also grateful to Northrop Grumman and NASA Goddard for making my JWST visit possible. It is time once again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society. It's Dr. Bruce Betts. Welcome back. Was that a seal impression? Sea lion, technically. But yeah, I just felt pinniped today.

I don't know why. Well, you may have trouble as a pinniped dealing with the gift that I got you, which I'm holding up to Bruce right now. We can see each other. I'm going to open up the bag. What? Oh, this is very exciting. Oh. That's so cool. Thank you, Matt.

Isn't it pretty? It is pretty. I'll get it to you someday. Okay. Awesome. Thank you, Matt. Isn't it pretty? It is pretty. I'll get it to you someday. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. The Mars-Venus snuggle I've been promising for weeks. It's happening July 12th. Mars and Venus low in the west shortly after sunset.

So in the dusky time, you will see super bright Venus. And over the days before and after July 12th, you'll see Mars moving from above Venus to below Venus, looking reddish, more than 100 times dimmer than Venus, but they'll be actually closer than the width of a full moon. It's going to be cool, but make sure you try to get a good view to the western horizon. For an easier target, and coming up in the middle of the night, just about right in the middle of the night in the east, we've got really bright Jupiter with Saturn, yellowish, kind of to its upper right, and they'll be up high in the south in the pre-dawn. Mercury, it's tough. Mercury's going away, but you might still catch Mercury low in the pre-dawn east. That's our sky.

On to this week in space history. It's another hard to believe for you, Matt. Ten years ago was the final launch of the space shuttle, STS-135 Atlantis. That is hard to believe because it was ten and a half years ago that I tried to watch a shuttle launch and unsuccessfully. So I never did get to see one lift off of the pad there. But, man, that's just crazy. You never got to see one? I'll see if I can do something and get another one scheduled.

Would you? Thank you. I think it's worth it. I think there are probably others out there, at least three or four of us, who never got to witness one. Yank them out of museums. It'll be great. We'll just steal one. We'll steal one from, I don't know, maybe LA's... This is a plot of a great movie. We're going to need Nicolas Cage. I know someone who knows someone who knows Nicolas Cage, so I'm on it. I've seen movies with him in it.

My son does a fine impersonation of him, but I don't think that's relevant right now. What is relevant right now is that in 1979, two interesting things happened this week. Probably more than two, but I'm going to tell you about two. Voyager 2 did its Jupiter flyby before it headed off to three more planets, and Skylab reentered in a fiery reentry, spreading material across the Indian Ocean and a little bit into Australia. I remember that. Boy, that was a big deal, too.

Remember the people selling T-shirts with targets on them? Yes, yes, I do do as a matter of fact all right we move on to the promised so according to nasa and i i believe him but i haven't i just say that because i i haven't actually done the calculation myself and it is so amazing. The James Webb Space Telescope will be so sensitive. How sensitive will it be? It will be so sensitive that it will be able to see the heat signature, the thermal signature of a bumblebee at the distance of the moon. That's good.

Okay, lunar bumblebees, your time is up. Oh, that's a good one. You're absolutely right. Let's go on to that contest. So we hope there's no space apiary in the way. I just wanted to use the word apiary. All right, we go on to the contest, and I ask you, which is the only one of the 88 official IAU constellations named for an actual historic person?

How'd we do, Matt? You tell me how we did. What's the answer here? What were you looking for? Coma Berenices. Apologize, pronunciation's off. Its name means Berenice's hair in Latin. And she was the queen of Egypt. Queen Berenice II of Egypt counts as actual person.

Rob Cohane in Massachusetts. Long-time listener. He's been listening to the show or at least entering the contest for at least five years. First-time winner. So congratulations, Rob. We're going to send him another copy of that terrific book, Carbon, One Adam's Odyssey by John Barnett that we've been talking about for a few weeks here. So enjoy that, Rob, and see it paid off. This should be a good lesson to the rest of you who are still waiting for that first win. I have a fun story for you, among other responses that we got from people. And this is from Kent Murley in Washington. And it starts with this astronomer who worked in the Egyptian court. Conan of Samos, later apparently of TBS, needed to, but seriously folks, needed to cement his job as astronomer at a seaside temple to Arsinoe II of Library of Alexander fame.

When Berenice II became wary of the late return of her cousin-slash-husband, there's a story, Ptolemy III from the Third Syrian War. She pledged her tresses to Arsinoe, aligned with Aphrodite and protection from shipwrecks, after the vote of her tresses went missing. And the return Ptolemy III was doubly angered, a shorn queen and a PR mess. angered, a shorn queen, and a PR mess. Conan of Samos, waging spin, declared Arsinoe had placed the tresses in the heavens. Ptolemy III was appeased, Conan lived, and Berenice II went up in history. And he closes with this, to baldly go where no woman has gone before. boldly go where no woman has gone before. That is quite a story. Yeah, well done, Kent. Thank you very much.

Here's some more stuff. Curtis Frank says that the constellation also contains our galactic North Pole, which I didn't know. It's a southern hemisphere thing. Matthew Walter in Louisiana. Maybe Conan the Astronomer regaled the court of Ptolemy III with random space facts, and Dr. Bruce can trace his ancient lineage to this noble wise man. Oh, I know. I'm going on to Ancestry.com shortly. There were a lot of comments about splitting hairs, and speaking of splitting hairs, a lot of responses about a different constellation,

Scutum or Scutum, which was originally named Scutum Sobiescianum, or the Shield of Sobiesci, which apparently was named to honor King Jan III Sobieski in the Battle of Vienna. This is back in the 17th century. Not really, because Bruce was looking for a person, not a person's shield. Am I correct there? That is correct. We're going to go with a no on that, but interesting historical reference. And here's another one from Mark Bailey in California, who is under the impression that Hercules may in fact have been a real person also.

I think I've heard speculation about this, that Hercules may have been based on a living person. Finally, Ian Gilroy in Australia. Alas, as a follically challenged member of the Planetary Society, I'm with you, Ian. Such sacrifices are beyond me. But I wonder what the amply coiffed Bruce would be willing to sacrifice his abundant locks for. A successful sample return from Mars, perhaps. I would gladly sacrifice my ample locks for such

noble rocks. It's true. Your hair is magnificent. Oh, why thank you. Your hair is non-existent. Had a good run. Yeah, it did. It did have a good run.

Live hard, fall out early. That's what that was all about. I think that's the motto of the next Fast and Furious movie, but I'm not sure. F and F10. Okay, before we go any further off track, take us to another contest. All right. We're going to start with something that I'm guessing you discussed in the interview I haven't heard yet about James Webb,

that it will be stationed at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2, L2. Here's my question, though. What was the first spacecraft stationed at Earth-Sun L2. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. So not just any L2, L point, Lagrange point, but L2 specifically. And Earth-Sun L2, even more specific. Okay, I get it. Hope you get it too. You have until Wednesday, July 14th

at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get it. Get it to us, that is. And you might win yourself, why not, a Planetary Radio t-shirt. That's it. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look out in the night sky, think about space bumblebees, but you can't hear them buzz. Thank you, and good night. That's great.

In space, no one can hear you. He's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its observant members. You can join them as we learn about life, the universe, and everything at planetary.org slash join. Mark Hilverda and Jason Davis, our associate producers,

Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser at Astro.