A pair of students scurry to class. A jogger plods along. The ordinary hubbub of a college campus characterizes the scene outside of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), located in the Steven Muller Building on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus in north Baltimore.

Yet inside the building, none of the activity falls within the realm of the ordinary. There, on the second floor of the nondescript, 1980s-style building, astrophysicists and engineers work to finalize the alignment of mirrors on the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched on December 25, 2021, and now roughly one million miles from Earth, orbiting what astronomers call L2, short for the second Lagrange Point.

L2 is the perfect place for the $10-billion space telescope to orbit. After all, it lies opposite the sun, which means the telescope can maintain the extremely low temperatures it needs to capture images of stars and galaxies light-years away. Lined up precisely with the sun and Earth, L2 also serves as what astronomers call a “gravity pocket,” an area with balanced gravitational pull that keeps the telescope in lockstep with the Earth’s orbit and eliminates the risk that it will, say, float off in deep space.

Yet the location of L2 means scientists can’t visit the telescope if something goes wrong. This differs from another powerful telescope, the famous Hubble Space Telescope, also operated out of STScI, and currently orbiting Earth at an altitude of approximately 340 miles. So far, astronauts have serviced Hubble onboard the spacecraft five times since it launched in 1990. But in deep space—which NASA defines as past the moon’s orbit—the JWST, or Webb, as it’s often called, is off-limits, meaning all maintenance and troubleshooting takes place not aboard the spacecraft but here in Baltimore, on the backside of Hopkins’ campus, along winding, tree-lined San Martin Drive.

There, Mission Operations Manager (MOM) Carl Starr—yes, his last name is Starr—huddles with his team in the Flight Control Room (FCR) of the Mission Operations Center (MOC) of the JWST, the most powerful, expensive space telescope ever built, one that promises to unlock answers to the origins of our universe, such as how galaxies first formed after the Big Bang. Like many federally and internationally funded programs—this one is a product of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA)—working on the JWST means, on top of other cognitively demanding tasks, memorizing a list of acronyms spanning 48 pages.

“Everyone calls me MOM,” says Starr, pictured above, who has worked on JWST since 2004, and whose position as MOM started 30 minutes after launch, when the telescope separated from the shuttle and began its journey to the deep, dark orbit of L2. Starr, who has curly brown-red hair, mutton chops, and a goatee, wears a blue-and-black-checkered blazer with a pin on his lapel representing the telescope’s signature 18 hexagonal mirrors, which look like a honeycomb.

The dad of a 10-year-old, Starr says his daughter finds it funny to hear his team of 600-plus people refer to him as MOM. But some of his responsibilities, it turns out, come across as mom-like. For one, he oversees the team that monitors the health of the JWST—taking its temperature to make sure instruments and systems don’t overheat, sending commands to keep the telescope on task. He also oversees communication among the MOC’s multidisciplinary teams, such as the engineers sitting in an adjoining room with expertise in areas like propulsion and thermal engineering, along with the astrophysicists and physicists working fastidiously around the corner on the telescope’s wavefront sensing technology, which uses algorithms to align the 18 mirrors and maintain optical systems.

Starr’s desk sits in the middle of the back row of the FCR, which is ground control for the telescope. Multiple signs hang on the glass wall and entryway, cautioning anyone who enters that this is a “Controlled Area by Order of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” in which “Unauthorized Persons Who Enter May be Subject to Prosecution Under Title 18 U.S. Code 799.”

Roughly the size of a school classroom, the FCR consists of nine desks on which stands a sea of gleaming monitors. The desks face the back of the room, oriented intentionally in the direction of two large, hanging screens that display the telescope’s movement and location. Two digital clocks flank the screens, one displaying Eastern Standard Time (EST) and the other Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), based on the Earth’s rotation.

Beyond the glowing, digitalized control room is something unlike anything else in the room: a view not into a pixelated screen but into nature. Made possible by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, the view shows a panoply of tall oak, maple, and birch trees, swaying gently in the wind outside, a stream meandering through the middle.

The panorama of Earth comes in handy, at times, to a team with their eyes on the far-off universe. Starr included it intentionally when he worked with an engineer and architect to design the room. “Nature soothes and calms,” he says. At times, the high stakes work environment calls for it.

“My position as MOM is like the conductor of the orchestra,” says Starr. “I keep things moving, and then, when things don’t go as expected, I become more like a general on a battlefield.”

 

“MY POSITION AS MOM IS LIKE THE CONDUCTOR OF THE ORCHESTRA.”

 

With three decades of work in operations engineering, on top of military experience—Starr served in Operation Desert Shield in Iraq—he can remain calm, and keep others calm, under pressure. “When an anomaly happens, I call a triage meeting, I hear from all the leads and subject-matter experts, and I help get a new plan together,” he says. “But sometimes that $10-billion price tag falls right on our shoulders.”

Starr can tell by body language when his team is tense or frustrated.

“Sometimes people freeze, and I take off my headset and then walk up to talk to them personally and say, in a calm voice, ‘This is what just happened. It’s really critical that in the next three minutes we do X, Y, and Z,’” he says. “And then it’s ‘Copy that, Wilco,’ and we go on about our business.”

Kayla Yates sits on the front row of the FCR, next to Irma Aracely Quispe-Neira. Yates serves as the command controller, while Aracely Quispe-Neira works as the operations controller. Together, they monitor the telemetry, or the automatic measurements and data sent from the telescope via a radio signal to Earth.

Just a few years out of an undergraduate program in astronautical engineering, Yates is one of the youngest members of the team at 26, and the only one, on most days, sending direct commands to the telescope. Written in a standard computer programming language and tailored to the needs of the spacecraft, the commands tell the telescope to do things like turn off a certain system so it can cool down, maneuver to a new position, or perform whatever task the engineering, wavefront-sensing, and instrument teams deem necessary.

The command requests first go to Starr, who works with Yates and Aracely Quispe-Neira, 39, to schedule the procedure in a timely manner, among other priorities. Yates then types in the commands with her long, glossy, taupe-painted fingernails, checking the script multiple times—and having Aracely Quispe-Neira double-check it—before hitting send.

When asked how it feels to be one of only a handful of scientists communicating with the telescope, Yates is surprisingly blasé. “I think it’s the routine of it all,” says the engineer, who communicates with the telescope every day, with a shrug. “It’s the repetition of mostly looking at numbers.”

Yates almost went to art school and stands out, in combat boots and a boho-style dress, from her conservatively clad colleagues (with the exception of Starr, perhaps, and his unconventional facial hair). But she decided, at the last minute, to pursue her passion for math and science by attending Capitol Technology University in Laurel to study astronautical engineering and computer science. “It’s a very niche program,” Yates says. “It’s similar to an aerospace degree, except mine was totally focused on flight outside of an atmosphere.”

Like everyone who works at the MOC, Yates underwent extensive training for her current role, training that Starr says involved late-night studying and exams and equates to “going to school all over again.” But if anything, Yates feels overprepared. “In so many ways, the flight is going almost flawlessly, compared with what we practiced and prepared for in training on the simulator,” she says.

Right now, the preparation appears to have paid off, given that the telescope is sailing through the “commissioning phase,” a term used to describe the six months after launch, during which the various teams make sure that all systems and components work according to plan. With the telescope’s tennis-court-sized sun shield deployed and keeping it cool, plus the 18 mirrors unfolded, and, as of press time, aligned, the JWST is nearly ready to start capturing images and conducting the research that NASA and its partners created the observatory to do.

 

“WEBB WILL PROBABLY ALTER HOW WE CONCEIVE OF OUR PLACE ON EARTH . . .”

 

So far, images taken and transmitted back to Earth have exceeded even the team’s wildest imaginations. “Look at this,” Starr says, with a sparkle in his eyes as he pulls one up on his smartphone. There, on the small screen, brilliant bursts of light populate nearly every inch, like an explosion of stars and galaxies. “They will only get clearer,” he says, “and are going to blow us away.”

Like the stunning images taken over the past few decades by the Hubble Telescope, the JWST will capture and share with the public exquisite looks at stars, planets, and galaxies never seen before. But while the Hubble detects light primarily within the visible and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum, the JWST will detect light largely ininfrared—and see objects 10 to 100 times fainter than Hubble, according to NASA. This, combined with Webb’s much larger mirror and state-of-the-art detectors, will enable the JWST to peer “back in time” to see the universe billions of years in the past—and hopefully solve the mystery of how the first galaxies formed.

Webb’s resolution, NASA says, will enable it to capture intricate details of, for example, an object the size of a regulation soccer ball 340 miles away, or the size of a penny about 24 miles away. That level of detail, at such a distance, is unprecedented. It will “enable the telescope, and scientists worldwide, to use infrared to truly unveil the universe,” says Quyen Hart, a senior education and outreach scientist at STScI.

“Hubble enabled us to discover planets outside of our solar system in the 1990s, so now our questions are: What, exactly, do we know about these planets? Are they hot? Do they have atmospheres? Are they like Earth?” she continues. “Webb will open the door to these answers and others—and probably alter how we conceive of our place on Earth and in the universe.”

NASA and its partners plan to release the first images this July, with events and celebrations happening worldwide at informal learning institutions like science centers, libraries, museums, and planetariums. A map of more than 600 events in Baltimore and across the United States is available online, along with updates on the precise release date of the actual photos, once NASA turns them over to the public.

Space enthusiasts can also visit NASA’s Universe of Learning for activities and resources to dive into the science of Webb, other observatories, and outer space in general. And they can follow NASA’s hashtags on social media for all things JWST—#UnfoldTheUniverse and #NASAWebb.

Or they can walk the path that coils along San Martin Drive on Hopkins’ campus, and when they pass the Steven Muller Building, with the “Go, Webb, Go!” banner fluttering outside, salute the team of scientists hard at work uncovering the mysteries of the cosmos.

As an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Christine Chen spends her days poring through research proposals from the world’s astronomers and astrophysicists—all eager for time on NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), considered the most powerful technology of its kind in history. Launched on December 25, the $10 billion telescope, now hurtling through space to a destination one million miles away, promises to answer questions about the origins of our universe.

What most excites you about the telescope?
JWST will probe farther back in time than any other instrument to see the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. The universe is expanding, and these distant galaxies are flying away from us at tremendous speeds. With the telescope’s use of infrared wave lengths, we can peer into these galaxies at the edge of time and advance our understanding of galaxy evolution—and how the universe evolved from those first galaxies 100 million years after the Big Bang to the galaxies we see today.

We’ll also learn a tremendous amount about exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system that orbit a star, and the composition of their atmospheres. This field has grown immensely since astronomers discovered the first exoplanet in the mid-1990s. Since then, we’ve discovered more than 4,000, which has led to exponential growth in our understanding of planets. With JWST, that growth will continue to expand our knowledge, likely in a mindboggling way.

For example, we might learn what happens, say, on an extremely hot planet with a temperature of 1,700 kelvin, or 2,600.33 degrees Fahrenheit, versus planets with temperatures more like Earth, at 300 kelvin, or 80.33 degrees Fahrenheit. At 1,700 kelvin, silicates condense to make up the mineral olivine and gemstone peridot—deposits that cause the green sand beaches of Hawaii. So, we can imagine that there might be green clouds of peridot on these planets or something totally unlike what we see on Earth.

The international astronomy community awaited the launch of JWST for a long time. Tell us about the wait—and how it feels to have the telescope off the ground.
When I joined the mission in 2008, JWST was scheduled to launch in 2014 but ran into a whole series of setbacks. One challenge involved the telescope’s enormous sun shield. Made of five thin layers, each the size of a tennis court, the sun shield launched in a folded position and needed to unfurl in space, with hundreds of motors and actuators syncing to make it happen. When they tested it on the ground, the sun shield tore, and they had to patch it. This, in itself, caused a number of delays. On December 31, 2021, the sun shield deployed successfully in space. Now that we’re a few months in, we’re past the big milestones involving scary engineering. We can breathe a huge sigh of relief—and just get excited about the work of tens of thousands of people’s efforts coming to fruition.

With scientists worldwide clamoring to use the telescope for research purposes, how do you decide who uses JWST?
JWST is an “open skies telescope,” which means anybody can submit a proposal to use it, and data collected will be shared with the world as soon as possible so everyone can analyze and learn from it. But the telescope is in high demand, and time is limited. We use a double-blind peer-review process to remove bias from our proposal selection. This means we don’t know the scientist or institution submitting the proposal—a process that, we hope, will enable younger people and smaller institutions, not just the big R1 research institutions, to be more successful proposers. Another goal is to lower the success rate disparity between men and women.

How does it feel for you personally to be at the center of such a bold endeavor?
It’s tremendously exciting to work with the forward-thinking optimism that comes with everyone daydreaming about how our findings will revolutionize our understanding of the universe. It’s easy to get lost as a scientist, with your head down in analysis. But this reminds us that science is a human endeavor that pushes the frontier of knowledge.

We have to ask: do you expect to find life?
I think we’ll take a step in that direction, but I worry about people setting their expectations that we will definitively find life. It’s safe to say we’re looking for what we know are astrobiological-relevant molecules [which signal life] in these planets, but planets in their unique atmospheres are complex systems, and interpreting what we find will be complicated. Take, for example, when they searched for life in our own solar system and sent the Viking landers to Mars in the 1970s. They discovered that the chemistry of the planet was totally different, so the experiment they designed to work on Earth didn’t work on Mars. The challenge will be getting past ourselves and our limited experience with only one way of life. The universe has so many unimagined possibilities.

When can the public expect to see the first images?
Six months after the launch, at the end of June, NASA will share what they call “early release observations” to give everyone a flavor of the kinds of images and information JWST can generate. We can expect to see some gorgeous, newsworthy pictures at that time, while getting a sense of what’s to come.

Kenneth Sembach was just a fifth-grader in suburban Chicago when a book report set the course of his life. He was perusing his school’s library, looking for a worthy title, when the bell rang. “I was out of time,” he recalls now, nearly 40 years later, a faint Midwestern lilt still detectable in his measured, thoughtful speech. “I picked up a book on the shelf—I had to have something—and it was a small field guide to the stars. . . . So I would go outside at night and see if I could find these things. This sparked my imagination, and I’ve been in love with it ever since.”

The “it,” of course, is astronomy. Or maybe the universe. Or maybe scientific discovery. Or maybe all three. In any case, Sembach is still staring up at the sky in wonder, asking questions—only now he’s in a position to answer them.

Sembach is the new director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)—a facility located on the Homewood campus of The Johns Hopkins University and operated by a consortium of astronomical research universities for NASA. In a beige office building off San Martin Drive, he now leads some of the world’s best minds—a Nobel Prize winner among them—in some of mankind’s most ambitious scientific endeavors.

The most famous of these undertakings is the Hubble Space Telescope for which STScI runs science operations. The data that Hubble has sent back and STScI scientists have analyzed has transfixed astronomers and the public at large, most dramatically via exquisite images of swirling nebulae, billowing dust clouds, and kaleidoscopic galaxies.

In October 2018, Hubble will get a companion in the skies—the James Webb Space Telescope, affectionately known as “the Webb.” Though as monumental a project as Hubble—which has, among other things, helped astronomers determine the current rate at which the universe is expanding—the Webb will differ in several key ways.

Unlike Hubble, which circles the Earth in a low orbit, Webb will be propelled a million miles into space and parked. Operating just a few degrees above absolute zero, it will be able to look back through time to detect the dying embers of some of the first stars and galaxies that formed not long after the Big Bang.

That is, if all goes according to plan. Because of its distance from the Earth, the observatory will not be serviceable like Hubble is—“so,” acknowledges Sembach, “it has got to work.”

The reason for the distance is because the Webb, unlike Hubble, is primarily an infrared observatory, meaning its instruments will distinguish wavelengths of light that are beyond the visible spectrum (aka ROYGBIV), but that can suggest temperature. If it were in orbit around the Earth, the heat from the planet and the sun would interfere with its readings. And we want those readings crystal clear. They will help answer some of mankind’s most enduring questions.

“At some point, we’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did that.’”

On a dreary November day, just a little over two weeks into his tenure as STScI’s fifth director, Sembach sits perched on the edge of a couch in his unnervingly neat third-floor office. (“That’s ’cause I’ve just moved in. Give it time, give it time,” he cracks.) He has just come from giving a pep talk to some of STScI’s approximately 650 employees. With the telescope still in pieces around the country and staffers buried in minutiae prepping for its assembly and launch, he says he reminded them to take the long view.

“You come and you work on it every day, and sometimes it just doesn’t sink in,” he says, “but you step back and you say, ‘Wow, that was something really great that we did.’”

To illustrate the difference Webb’s infrared view of the cosmos will make, he pulls up side-by-side images taken by Hubble of towers of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula known as the “Pillars of Creation.”

One of the images, taken using visible light, is ethereally beautiful, like a detail from a ’70s rock concert with a kick-ass laser light show and smoke machines on full blast. But the other, taken using infrared light (Hubble has limited infrared capabilities), is so sharply, densely brilliant with stars that it resembles a close-up of a diamond-encrusted dress.

“If you want to look into clouds of gas and see stars forming . . . the infrared light’s longer wavelength just kind of goes right in—or in this case comes right out—so you can see
objects that are enshrouded in dust,” Sembach explains.

But it’s not just about clearer images. It’s about what those images can tell us—and it’s a long list.

“We can answer questions like when did the first stars and galaxies form. . . . Those first stars that formed black holes and were the nuclei for galaxies, what did they look like? When did those stars and black holes start shaping the medium around them? How did those galaxies evolve over 13 billion years to the kinds of galaxies we see today? How do stars form? We still don’t really know how stars form. That’s kind of amazing,” Sembach says.

Then there is the wish-list question.

“Obviously, whether we know it or not, we’re on this quest to find out whether there are other planets like the Earth out there,” he says. “We have a chance now, probably not with Webb, but you never know. We’ve done things with Hubble we would have never thought of.”

There is one more major difference between Hubble and the Webb, and that is that STScI can claim the Webb in a way it never could with Hubble. Of course, STScI has been and will continue to be deeply involved with Hubble, but mission control for that observatory is 30 miles down 295 in Greenbelt. But for Webb, both the flight and scientific operations will happen at STScI. In fact, the command center at STScI is under construction right now. “Once it’s up in the sky,” Sembach acknowledges, “it is, for lack of a better term, ours.” Which means that, to a very large extent, it’s also his.

If you have to rest the weight of an $8.7 billion space-exploration project on one person’s shoulders, Sembach seems a good choice. After receiving an undergraduate degree in physics (with honors, naturally) from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he earned a three-year fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following that, he stayed on at MIT for a year and a half before coming to Hopkins to work on a project involving ultraviolet light. He joined STScI in 2001 as an instrument scientist for Hubble and, as he says, “moved up the food chain here.”

“Once it’s up in the sky, it is, for lack of a better term, ours,” says Sembach.

He notes that this assignment, which is as much about team-building and leadership as it is about scientific know-how, has arrived at a good time in his career.

“When I was a kid, astronomy was a very personal thing,” he says. “It was mine. It was something for me. And it was that way even well through school and the early part of my career. [There were] things I really wanted to do, things I really identified with that I really wanted to know. And now it has become a broader perspective. A lot of times, it’s the people I work with, the people I meet, the people I can help motivate, that’s what gets me up in the morning.”

But there are other things in life besides work, even for Sembach, who rarely takes vacations and says he is “on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” When asked to name his hobbies, he cites gardening, woodworking, and running, but you get the impression he could survive without them if he had to. Only one thing seems to truly rival his passion for work.

“I spend a lot of time talking to Marguerite,” he says, referring to his wife, Marguerite Hoyt, a writer, historian, and former women’s studies professor at Goucher College. “One of my favorite things to do is just sit at the coffee shop and talk with her. We talk about everything, what she’s doing, what I’m doing—science, history, politics.”

The couple met during their first day of freshman orientation at the University of Chicago, and their union, by both accounts, is rare in its compatibility and devotion.

“We’re very close. We are absolutely a real team,” says Hoyt. “It’s as simple as, when he gets home every night, we cook dinner together. He does all the chopping, and I do all the cooking. My mother has said, ‘You guys are like a ballet in the kitchen. You work together so well.’ And we do. It’s almost like we can read each other’s minds sometimes.”

And though Hoyt admits her husband’s job can be an occasional inconvenience, she has long since accepted its central place in their life.

“A long time ago, just before we were getting married, I was complaining about him being an astronomer and being out of town all the time and working all the time,” she recalls. “And another astronomer’s wife, who is a friend of mine, she looked at me and she said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You knew exactly what his job was going to be when you got together with him. So you can’t complain about this.’ And I thought, ‘She’s absolutely right. I cannot complain about this because I knew this is what his life would be and what he wanted so badly.’ You kind of have to make peace with that.”

A few years ago, Hoyt quit her job at Goucher and now devotes herself to creative writing projects and keeping the home fires burning at their house in Ellicott City. She says she doesn’t regret leaving academia and takes pride in her “tiny contribution” to her husband’s noble mission.

And it is noble—though Sembach is too Midwesternly modest to use the word himself. But it is obvious he thinks of the Webb as the next great leap for mankind.

“James Webb is the largest science project this country is doing,” he says. “It’s going to be amazing, it’s going to be absolutely amazing. At some point, we’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did that.’”