The stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope that were released this week have a special meaning in Rochester.
That’s because some of the key work involving construction of the deep space telescope was performed in Rochester.
The new batch of photos released on Tuesday was eagerly anticipated by a group of engineers and other staffers at L3Harris Technologies in the Rochester Tech Park.
That company’s Space & Airborne Systems division worked to integrate the Webb’s complex system of mirrors and tested it to simulate the harsh conditions of space.
Becky Borelli is a Principal Fellow with L3Harris, and she said to see some of the first photos produced by the Webb telescope was an exciting moment for her team.
“I think everyone was just a little bit stunned. I mean, we knew we were all expected really amazing images to come out,” Borelli said. “But then to actually see it and to see the color and to see the level of resolution, and what can be seen in these images was really incredible.”
Borelli said the work that L3Harris employees performed on the space telescope had to be extremely precise.
“And the alignment that we’re talking about is on the order of nanometers, so if you took a human hair and divided its diameter 100,000 times, that’s the level of precision that we had to have in aligning those segments.”
Borelli said the images that the Webb telescope can show will have a major impact on astronomy.
“Our understanding of the universe and how planets are formed and what’s out there and how planets evolve, has informed not just what we do on space missions and stuff, but how we do science here on the ground,” said Borelli.
About 300 employees of L3 Harris worked on the project for more than 20 years. L3 Harris Technologies is now working on a next-generation space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which the company said will survey wide areas of space with a field of view much larger than the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope.
It is scheduled to launch in the mid 2020s.
