Thousands of people worked on this over almost 20 years. Webb is the biggest, most complicated telescope we've ever built. For many Northrop Grumman employees, the opportunity to work on Webb, constructing one of the most complex space telescopes ever, was the opening for boundless opportunity. states and 14 countries.Ĭompared to other contemporary space projects in the public and private sector, the size and scale of Webb’s mission made it something uniquely different - and a challenge that was a huge difficulty to build. It took three space agencies (NASA, Canadian Space Agency and European Space Agency), more than 400 companies, 10,000 scientists and engineers, and 300 scientific/academic organizations from 29 U.S. 2002, NASA announced that Northrop Grumman would lead its industry team as the prime contractor for designing and developing the most critical components of this ”next-generation space telescope.”įrom an organizational standpoint, Webb is a 20-year triumph of public-private partnership. The technology and the science will bring history together at a single, irreversible point, illuminating that we are capable of discovering whether we are alone in the universe.” “Webb continually operated near the edge of the impossible," Mountain said. That quest to push the boundaries of invention became a central theme of the 20-year development, said Matt Mountain, Webb telescope scientist and president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. “We ran into so many challenges so often that people began to ask: ‘Is this too hard? Can it really be done?’” “Nothing was easy,” said Scott Willoughby, vice president and program manager for Webb at Northrop Grumman who, alongside several of his teammates, earned NASA's highest level of recognition of non-governmental individuals for his exceptional contributions to Webb. In the past, space exploration often inherited technologies from other areas. And, they had to invent new technologies nearly every step of the way - many integral to the launch vehicle, image processing, electromechanical systems, thermal systems and complex sunshield.
Engineers needed to create an observatory able to unfold in space with a deployable telescope more than six times larger than Hubble send it more than a million miles away from Earth and operate it at extreme cryogenic temperatures. Led by Northrop Grumman, the global aerospace and defense technology company, engineers from across the industry addressed and developed solutions to these mind-bending ideas.
This feat of human ingenuity is set to change our understanding of cosmic connections and give insight into long-considered existential questions such as: “How did we get here?” and “Are we alone?” With this ability to look farther into the interstellar past, Webb can see to a time when the earliest stars and galaxies were born. The ultraviolet and visible light emitted by the very first luminous objects that formed in the universe has been stretched so that it reaches us today, more than 13.5 billion years later, as infrared light, visible to Webb’s unique instruments. Webb is an infrared telescope designed to study every phase of cosmic history and view objects once thought too old, distant or faint. And now, roughly six months after the world looked on in awe at the first stunning images of faraway galaxies and celestial formations, Webb’s groundbreaking engineering and technology design continues to astound the senses, boggle the mind and push the boundaries of scientific possibility. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launched a year ago from Kourou, French Guiana, beginning its historic mission to help humanity better understand the universe.
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