Optics Colloquium
10:30 AM

Friday, January 26, 2007

Wilmot 116

Lee Feinberg

NASA Goddard Flight Center

Title:

Designing and Building the Next Big Space Telescope: The James Webb Space Telescope

Abstract:

This talk will give an inside account on the design and development of the Hubble Space Telescope’s (HST) successor: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The talk will explain why JWST is being developed, overview its design, and address how its development is progressing. The talk will focus on the unique optical challenges of the telescope including the lightweight beryllium mirrors, the unique architecture for aligning the segmented telescope, methods being employed to test the telescope, and the large deployable and stable structures that will hold the mirrors. The talk will contrast the JWST technology to HST and show how JWST is not only the scientific successor to HST, but also the technological successor.

Biography:

Lee Feinberg works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) where he is Telescope Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope. Lee was the 2006 recipient of GSFC’s Moe Schneebaum Memorial Award for Engineering, a yearly award which recognizes the GSFC employee who has made the most significant contribution to space flight technology. Lee also recently served as the Chair of the NASA Agency level Advanced Telescope and Observatory Capability Roadmap Committee. In his previous position at NASA, he was the Assistant Chief for Technology in the Instrument Technology Center at GSFC. Prior to that, Lee spent a decade working on the instruments that fixed and upgraded the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). While on HST, Lee played a key role in the verification of optics and testing of the COSTAR and Wide Field and Planetary Camera-2 instruments launched on the first HST servicing mission to fix Hubble’s optical problem. Lee then served as the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph Instrument Manager which flew on the second HST servicing mission and later led the conceptual study team for the HST Wide Field Camera-3 slated for the next HST servicing mission. Before coming to NASA, Lee worked at Ford Aerospace and before that was a student intern at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. Mr. Feinberg received a BS in Optics from the University of Rochester and a MS in Applied Physics from The Johns Hopkins University.