What number raised to the 130th power is equal to 0.95? That number is basically one. So just ask yourself, let’s suppose you want to have a 95 percent chance of success. We could have still had a mission if some didn’t fire, but most of them were absolutely necessary for the success of the mission.

So you can’t qualify the part, but what you can do is qualify the process. If you do reuse one, well, it’s now a different actuator because you have to solder it back together. You build them and they get used, basically, once. They have these things called nonexplosive actuators. But there are some things that that are interesting. Īnd then there were a lot of things that had to work.Īcton: Yes, right. So, for me, the place to be was at a computer console. I didn’t think there was going to be any problem with it, but deployment starts, basically, minutes after launch. It’s like sending your kid off to college-this instrument that we’d been looking at and thinking about. I was thinking we had a 70 percent chance of mission success, or something like that. And then it was a question of taking this technology, algorithms, understanding it and implementing it into very robust procedures, documentation, and software, so that it could then be applied on the flight telescope.Īcton: Well, I’ve got to say, there was a lot of nervousness, at least on my part. Then more complicated, very complicated experiments and eventually something known as TRL 6 technology-Technology Readiness Level 6-which demonstrated that we could do this in a flightlike environment. None of that technology really existed in 2001, so we started from the ground up with concepts and simple experiments. You worked on it for more than 20 years.Īcton: Well, we had to invent all of the wavefront sensing and controls. Talk about your work getting the telescope ready for flight. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. And eventually that led to wavefront sensing and controls, which led to the Webb telescope.Ĭalled the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. You look inside an old television and there are mechanisms, there are smells and colors and sights and for a seven-year-old kid, it was just the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.įast-forward 25 years and I’m working in the field of adaptive optics. And from that moment on I was defined by electronics. I was just enthralled by what I saw inside this television.

And he gave me the old television to take apart. Scott Acton: When I was seven-years-old, my dad brought home a new television. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Acton after his team had finished aligning the telescope’s optics in space.

To produce clear images in the infrared wavelengths the telescope uses, the segments have to be within tens of nanometers of the shape specified in the spacecraft design.Īcton grew up in Wyoming and spent more than 20 years on the Webb team. He and his colleagues developed the systems that align the 18 separate segments of the Webb’s primary mirror with its smaller secondary mirror and science instruments. None of this would be possible without the work of a team led by Scott Acton, the lead wavefront sensing and control scientist for the Webb at Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Colorado. Its images-more detailed than what was possible before-show space aglow with galaxies, some of them formed very soon after the big bang. The James Webb Space Telescope, in just a few months of operation, has begun to change our view of the universe.

Who invented the telescope