Happy Father’s Day! Especially to the scientists who are not getting much love these days and enduring a lot of uncertainty.
I spent my time watching Cosmic Dawn by NASA (https://youtu.be/uSMGENDH_QI?si=1SVttqIqxP6oat50) with my kids – the fabulous story about James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We don’t do enough in science to publicize successes.
JWST is a true testament to human intelligence and ingenuity, international cooperation across 14 countries, amazing perseverance and grit to pack the most complex telescope and sun shield into the cargo of a rocket and moving it into a orbit a million miles with a tolerance of few feet where it is unpacked remotely Origami style.
This is a story of 3 decades of relentless human pursuit starting from 1996. This project overcame 344 single point failures that were identified with only one chance. Just think about that probability and the rigor that went into something like this mission. It survived many black and gray swan events like Hurricane Harvey, COVID, many administrations and government changes across the world. Absolutely no room for error as it had to survive the brutal vibrations of the launch. Once deployed, the Origami of the unfolding of the telescope and sun shield a million miles away had to be perfect.
The telescope itself is a human marvel but the more complex and underreported achievement is the sun shield with 1 mil membrane thickness that unfolds to tennis court size shield; five layers of those with precise separation to provide the thermal resistance to keep the telescope cold enough and protected from the sun.
The data coming in is already remarkable that is changing our understanding of the universe:
a) The universe is possibly older than 13.7 billion years
b) The data seems to contradict the Standard Model and current dark energy conceptualization
c) Getting us a glimpse of the formation of galaxies and getting us closer to the Big Bang
The benefits to humanity are much more than the insights into the origins of the universe and our own existence. The process led to 100s of innovations in materials, robotics and controls, most rigorous FMEA for extremely critical missions, and the most important human resource development. The new knowledge derived can create things in the future that we can’t imagine but the value of the output of the kids inspired is as boundless as the universe itself. We are reaping the benefits of the science and technology derived from the space explorers of the past pushing us in Star Wars parlance of going where no one has gone before – in this case through the eyes of JWST.
