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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, December 18, 2006 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Michael Menzel

"The James Webb Space Telescope"

ABSTRACT -- This presentation will give an overview of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) system and describe the progress made on observatory development since January of 2005, as well as some of the key engineering challenges still facing the designers of this "first of its kind" mission. The JWST will be NASA’s complementary successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The JWST telescope will have an aperture greater than 6 meters in diameter. Both the telescope and its science instruments, must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures below 40K. The low temperature will allow JWST, unlike Hubble, to make observations in the infra-red region of the spectrum.

The observatory will be stationed at the Sun-Earth L2 point. Therefore, as seen from JWST's position, the Sun and Earth will be in the same general direction, which will simplify the design of the thermal shield that will block radiation from both. It will therefore be possible to cool the payload passively.

SPEAKER -- Mr. Menzel received a Bachelor's Degree in physics from MIT in 1981. After graduation he worked as an antenna engineer for RCA Astro while earning a Master's Degree in Physics from Columbia University. In 1990 he joined the General Electric Astro Space Division where he participated in and led numerous proposals and advanced studies for spacecraft, including the Landsat 7, EOS Common, P91B, and Asian Cellular System (ACeS) Proposals, and the R2100 Common Spacecraft Bus Program. In 1995 he became Director of Systems Engineering at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Germantown. In 1997 he became Deputy Program Manager for the HST Servicing Missions Group for Lockheed Martin for the HOST Mission. Following this mission, he became Chief Systems Engineer for the Lockheed Martin Phase 1 Contract for the Next Generation Space Telescope, since renamed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Following the award of the telescope to Northrop Grumman in 2001, he joined Northrop Grumman as the East Coast Office Systems Engineer for JWST. In June 2004 he accepted his current position with GSFC as the JWST Mission Systems Engineer.



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