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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 26, 2018 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Photo of Randy Kimble

Randy Kimble

"Cryo-Vacuum Testing the James Webb Space Telescope"

ABSTRACT -- The James Webb Space Telescope is a 6.5m-diameter, segmented-aperture telescope equipped with near- and mid-infrared instruments (covering 0.6-28 micron wavelengths). It will be the scientific successor to Hubble as a flagship, general-purpose observatory, with unprecedented capabilities for observing astronomical objects ranging from the first galaxies in the distant, early universe, to exoplanets in the solar neighborhood, to objects in our own Solar System. Testing this huge, deployable observatory, which operates at cryogenic temperatures, presents a wide range of challenges. This talk will present some highlights of the JWST test program, focusing on the cryo-vacuum testing of the Integrated Science Instrument Module (here at Goddard) and the cryo-vacuum testing of the integrated telescope plus instrument suite, which took place last year in historic Chamber A at the Johnson Space Center. Test approaches, challenges, tools, adventures, and results will be described from these highly successful campaigns.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Randy Kimble joined NASA Goddard in 1990, as an astrophysicist in what is now the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory. He received his undergraduate degree at MIT and his Masters and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, with all degrees in Physics. After some time on the research staff at the Johns Hopkins University, working on the shuttle-based Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope project, he came to Goddard. At GSFC, he spent nearly twenty years helping to develop instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope, as Instrument Scientist and Co-I for the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, Co-I for the Advanced Camera for Surveys, and Instrument Scientist for the Wide Field Camera 3. He also served as HST Development Project Scientist from 2002 until the final Hubble Servicing Mission in 2009. After that mission, he joined the JWST Project as Integration & Test Project Scientist, his current position.

Dr. Kimble's scientific interests include resolved stellar populations and the local interstellar medium, as well as the development of astronomical instrumentation, particularly detectors.



Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov