[Music throughout][Tale of Two Telescopes:
Hubble Space Telescope and WFIRST. Engineering]
Tim Wilson: So my name is Tim Wilson, and I am the optics operations
lead at L3 Harris Technologies for our
imaging division that’ part of
space and airborne system. Jeanette Domber: My name is Jeanette Domber,
and currently I am the deputy program manager
for the work that Ball Aerospace is doing on the Wide Field Instrument for
WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Tim: Kodak, which was
the owner of the division that I’m in with L3 Harris
now, they had gotten a contract to make the
backup primary mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope, and
they were working on that project starting in about 1979,
1980, and that’s when I graduated from college and joined
the company. Jeanette: So I primarily worked on Hubble Servicing Mission 4.
I joined the team in late 2006, after the reinstatement of the
human servicing mission, and I got to support the mission through on-orbit
operations in May of 2010. Tim: I joined the WFIRST team
here in 2014. Jeanette: I have been working on
WFIRST for, I think about 4 years now.
I started on that program when Ball was in the pursuit phase
to win a role on the program, so I got to work on some of the early
studies that we did for NASA. And we have been
on-contract for parts of the Wide Field Instrument since
May of 2018. Tim: The specifications are about the
same for the mirrors, but today the technology and the
precision that we can measure those
parameters in the mirror is much better than it was in
1980. I mean back then we didn’t have desktop computers, we had
a lot of computer data programs that were running off of punch cards,
and Fortran programs and things like that. Today, the
technology and the test systems that we have gets us lots more data,
a lot more precision and knowledge about the performance
of the mirror surface. Jeanette: I got to move up into the
lead role for the STIS repair work at Ball
for Hubble, and it was a really great opportunity to really learn
systems engineering. I had had some taste of that when I was in
graduate school, but then I got work on it on a real program on Hubble.
You know, I was responsible for making sure that all aspects of the repair
that we were working came together and we delivered the hardware that the
astronauts could install to do that “open heart surgery” in
space. And then, when I started on WFIRST,
even though there was a gap between those two, I had transitioned from
structural engineering into systems engineering. Tim: To manufacture
something that precise, the lessons
that I learned with the Hubble team, as we went through that, and
that we’ve used and applied and refined over time,
have been really the important thing, you know, for my career.
that’s been fundamental. Jeanette: When we put together our WFIRST
team we really made sure that we channeled some of the things that we had learned on Hubble
to make sure that we had that team that was excited to work on
a mission like WFIRST together.
[Explore]
[NASA]