Harris scientists complete work on James Webb Space Telescope

Scientists from Harris Corporation have successfully completed testing for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. It's the last significant step before the telescope is integrated with the spacecraft that will carry it into orbit. About 130 Rochester-based Harris employees have been working on the project. 

“This testing culminates 15 years of hard work by our Harris team," said Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of Harris’ Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance business. "This extraordinary program is certain to dramatically increase our knowledge of the universe.”

Working on these flagship missions for NASA takes a long time, and the science is typically right at the cutting edge.

"Often we're doing things for the first time in history," Mitrevski said. "You have to invent new technologies and then invent ways to test them."

The Webb Telescope will be a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, although it's not a replacement. Hubble will continue to operate while the Webb Telescope offers an array of new technical capabilities.

At the heart of the new telescope are a series of hexagonal mirror segments. They combine to form a mirror with a diameter of 6.5 meters (21 feet, 4 inches), more than twice as wide as Hubble's 2.4-meter mirror.

Harris engineers integrated all 18 mirror segments on the Webb telescope and designed and installed the cryogenic test equipment, including a simulator to mimic the temperature of the sun.

To make observations in the infrared spectrum, the telescope must be kept very cold, otherwise heat from the telescope itself would overwhelm its instruments. After launch, the spacecraft will deploy a large shield to block light and heat from the sun, Earth and moon. Its orbital position — roughly 1.5 million kilometers from Earth — will keep all three of those bodies on the same side of the spacecraft at all times. 

The mirror segments, made of ultra-lightweight beryllium, will unfold and adjust to shape after launch. The telescope’s four instruments — cameras and spectrometers — have detectors that are able to record extremely faint signals.

A crew from Harris traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for the tests, which took several months. Among their challenges was the impact of Hurricane Harvey.

"I'm really proud of the way they dedicated themselves to protect the hardware during the storm," Mitrevski said, "and to find time to get out into the community to help with the cleanup efforts afterward."

The Webb telescope is designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe, from discovering the first stars and galaxies that formed after the big bang to studying the atmospheres of planets around other stars. It is a joint project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

"We are opening up a whole new territory of astronomy and will be able to see things we've never been able to see before," said John Mather, senior astrophysicist with NASA's Goddard Space Center. "Astronomy has always been an observational science and you just can not depend on your imagination alone."

James Webb's Legacy

The new telescope is named for James Webb, who led NASA from 1961 to 1968. Shortly after he took the helm of the fledgling space agency, President John Kennedy announced an ambitious plan to land an American on the moon before the end of the decade.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," Kennedy said in a famous speech at Rice University. "Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

Webb was up for the challenge, but fought to ensure that his agency was focused broadly on scientific research, and not just on the singular audacious goal that Kennedy had proclaimed.

"And so far as I'm concerned, I'm not going to run a program that's just a one-shot program," he told Kennedy, according to White House transcripts. "If you want me to be the administrator, it's going to be a balanced program that does the job for the country."

In addition to the Apollo program, which was focused on the moon mission, Webb created programs to develop robotic spacecraft and explore other regions in space. By the time that Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface in July1969, NASA had launched more than 75 space science missions to study the stars and galaxies, our own sun and nearby planets.

Webb knew that reaching the moon would require a community of scientific research, more than NASA could do on its own. He created the NASA University Program, which established grants for space research, funded the construction of new laboratories at universities and provided fellowships for graduate students.

And as early as 1965, Webb proposed that a major space telescope, then known as the Large Space Telescope, should become a major NASA effort. Putting such a telescope into orbit, outside the barrier of the earth's atmosphere, would open a new world of astronomical observation.

It took nearly a decade to develop a feasible plan for the space telescope, which received funding approval from Congress in 1977.  Building it took another decade, and the telescope — by then named after astronomer Edwin Hubble — launched in 1990.

Launch party

NASA says it plans to launch the Webb telescope on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in spring 2019. 

Mitrevski says some members of the team may travel to South America to watch the launch, while the rest will gather at the company's headquarters in Gates for a viewing party.

In the meantime, the Harris team will prepare the telescope for shipping to California, where assembly will take place. They'll also continue to support NASA on any technical issues that arise.

The testing completed last week represents the last major milestone in a project that many of them have spent more than a decade working on.

"The team feels a lot of pride and the fruits of their labor have paid off," Mitrevski said. "Our piece of it has been very important."

Harris researchers are already thinking about their next big NASA project, The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).  It's still in the early planning stages, with launch planned for sometime in the mid-2020s, but Harris is likely to play a major role.  

In addition to these projects that look outward into the universe, Harris has played a critical role in many of the imaging satellites that train their eyes back at earth.

The most recent was the WorldView-4, which provides much of the high resolution imagery used in Google maps and other similar consumer products.

Private companies have launched a handful of high resolution imaging satellites over the last 20 years. All of those launched by U.S. companies have featured camera systems that were developed in Rochester.

Harris' Rochester-based space division traces its roots to Kodak’s space and reconnaissance programs, which developed the backup mirror for the Hubble telescope.

ITT Industries purchased the Remote Sensing Systems business of Eastman Kodak Company in August 2004. In 2011, ITT changed the name of its space business to Exelis. In May 2015, Harris Corporation acquired Exelis.

SLAHMAN@Gannett.com

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