Project Description: 

Major: BS Aerospace Engineering Company: SGT, Inc. Mentor: Richard Lynch Code: 443 - James Webb Space Telescope Project

The James Web Space Telescope (JWST) is a spacecraft that has been designed to learn about how the universe was created after the big bang. When did light first occur? How did the galaxies, stars and planetary systems form? How are habitual planets formed? By searching for red
phase shifts of light, evidence can be gathered to provide solutions to these questions. That is why a large infrared telescope is being created to look far into the past to determine the state of the universe when it was created.

JWST will have a giant 6.6-meter mirror, which will reflect the light into each of the three main cameras of varying infrared sensitivity. The satellite will be kept at a cryogenic temperature in order to ensure that the quality of the cameras is not compromised. To do this, the telescope will be in a fixed orbit more then 1.5 million kilometers (4 times the distance of the moon) away from the warm earth, and will have a multi-layered shield the size of a tennis court to reflect the energy from the sun. The spacecraft will be launched by the Ariane 5 Launch Vehicle of the European Space Agency in 2011.

Contribution:

At the Goddard Space Flight Center, Bruce has been working for the contractor firm SGT, Inc., to provide system-engineering support for the JWST mission. His role within the project has varied from participating at operations meetings to updating the databases of the JWST mission requirement documents. Bruce has also been given the opportunity to explore other areas of the project to see how they function. As a result, Bruce has gone to numerous meetings on the structure and mechanics of JWST, as well as become responsible for an element of the overall mass budget of the satellite. He has enjoyed working on this mission and has learned a great deal about how a large-scale project is run at the management level.