Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, January 31, 2005 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Michael T. Menzel

"The James Webb Space Telescope "

ABSTRACT -- The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be NASA's successor mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST telescope will have an aperture greater than 6 meters in diameter, and along with its complement of science instruments must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures below 40K. The observatory will be operated at the Sun-Earth L2 point to keep thermal sources such as the Sun and Earth in the same general direction so that their radiation can be shielded, allowing the payload to attain these temperatures passively. This presentation will give an overview of the JWST system and describe the engineering challenges facing the designers of this "first of its kind" mission. The presentation will also describe the programmatic challenges facing the JWST team to achieve launch readiness by August of 2011.

SPEAKER -- Mr. Menzel received a Bachelors Degree in physics from MIT in 1981. After graduation he took a position as an antenna engineer for RCA Astro in East Windsor NJ from 1981 to 1990. During this time, he earned a Master Degree in Physics from Columbia University in 1986. In 1990 he took a position as Principal Member of the Technical Staff in the Systems Engineering Group at General Electric Astro Space Division where he participated and led numerous spacecraft proposals and advanced studies, including the Landsat 7, EOS Common, P91B, and Asian Cellular System (ACeS) Proposals, and the R2100 Common Spacecraft Bus IR&D Program. In 1995 he became Director of Systems Engineering at OSC Germantown in 1995. In 1997 he took a position as Deputy Program Manager for the HST Servicing Missions Group for Lockheed Martin. Following this mission, he was selected to be the Chief Systems Engineer for the Lockheed Martin Phase 1 Contract for the Next Generation Space Telescope. Following the award of the James Webb Space Telescope to Northrup Grumman in 2001, he accepted a position with Northrup as the East Coast Office Systems Engineer for JWST. And in June 2004 he accepted his current position with GSFC as the JWST Mission Systems Engineer.