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Hubble Gotchu introduces JWST August 3, 2010

Posted by sarah in: astronomy, space . 1 comment so far

The James Webb Space Telescope featured in last night’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon!

James Webb Does NYC June 1, 2010

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As part of the World Science Festival currently taking place in New York City, a full scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope is on display all week in the city’s Battery Park. The JWST YouTube channel had this funky time lapse video of the setting up. By the way, is it me or has the world gone nuts for time lapse videos in recent months?! Anyways, enjoy!

MIRI crosses the pond (Thoughts on PR) March 19, 2010

Posted by sarah in: science, space . 4comments

Gift-wrapping MIRI for our NASA colleagues

NASA issued a press release yesterday to announce that the engineering test model of the mid-infrared instrument for its next-generation space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, has arrived at Goddard. A picture is featured in the BBC’s Science & Technology news section today. As a member of the team that is in charge of testing MIRI prior to its integration with the telescope and launch, I’m glad to see the little one has arrived safely on US soil.

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Behind the Webb January 1, 2010

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First of all – best wishes for the new year to you all!

Working on an instrument for James Webb Space Telescope I regularly receive emails from NASA when the telescope features in the media or new images are released. Recently I discovered that there’s a new site for JWST called webbtelescope.org – in the style of hubblesite.org – and it contains a couple of episodes of a relatively new video podcast series called Behind the Webb. The first episode was about the detectors for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument whose testing and calibration I work on. As the components that actually transform the incoming photons from the teelscope into a digital signal that we can see, record, process and interpret, the detectors are the heart of the instrument – and this episode is a nice intro to how it all works. Watch it below via YouTube or go to the original page (whose embed code doesn’t seem to work).

Future facilities: Coming quite close now actually November 22, 2009

Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me, science . 1 comment so far

This week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.

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