Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations project scientist, discusses how NASA plans to wring as much science as possible from the $10-billion observatory
“Give me a telescope, and I can come up with something good to do with it,” says Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who serves as the agency’s operations project scientist for the $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful off-world observatory yet built by humankind.
Well, one of the things a project scientist does is act as the conscience for the science. This telescope was mostly built by engineers and managers, but scientists had to be in the loop, too, to ensure that it can do the science for which it’s being built.
This will be like explaining the difference between building a juicer versus actually using it to make juice, seeing where it gets jammed up, and fixing it. We also don’t want Webb to be idle. And, we need to get the data back to Earth. We talk to Earth about a third of the time during normal science operations, with a gimbaled antenna we can point while we’re observing. The data rate isn’t bad—about 30 megabits per second—but it’s slower than a cable modem, and there are 57 megapixels of memory within Webb’s instruments. We manage that by asking users not to be data hogs, and by doing a lot of data compression.
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