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- When you think about NASA, what comes to mind?
Do you think about images from incredible missions
like this or this or this?
Or what about some of the unbelievable spacecraft,
rovers, and launch systems like these?
From the outside, virtually everything NASA does
looks amazing,
but do you ever wonder how NASA engineers
and scientists develop the technology to pull off
these incredible missions?
The simple answer is teamwork.
That is what NASA does.
It takes seemingly impossible tasks
and makes them possible by working as a team.
That's same spirit of teamwork is still happening today.
To see this teamwork in action, we talked with
a NASA scientist and engineer
both working on one of NASA's newest near impossible missions,
the James Webb Space Telescope.
They will explain how engineering design works to
support science discovery as seen through the JWST mission.
- Lift off!
[rumbling] [upbeat music]
- Hi, I'm Stefanie Milam and I'm a scientist.
- I am Begoña Vila. I am an engineer.
- My job as a scientist is to seek the questions
that we've been asking ourselves for centuries.
What we hope to do with the James Webb Space Telescope
is sort of study the next unknown.
- My job as an engineer is to make sure
once we are building an instrument--
in this case the James Webb,
that we are doing all the testing that we need to do,
that we are making sure everything works
as it's supposed to, and that it's addressing
the needs that the scientists wanted--
had envisioned when they first thought of this proposal.
So some of the technology we have to develop
was to be able to collect more light
to make the instrument more sensitive the Hubble.
And to do that we know we needed a big mirror,
but the problem is if you have a big mirror,
you have to fit it inside a rocket.
That wouldn't work, so that's how we ended up
doing 18 individual segments
that we can fold inside a rocket
and once we are in orbit we can open up.
And then those mirrors need to have some special
technology in the back
because once we are in orbit, we want to align them
so they behave like a single mirror.
- So some of the new technologies
on the James Webb Space Telescope will help enable
new observations and reveal new things
in our galaxy and our universe that we were never able to see
with other telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope
or Spitzer Space Observatory.
This includes looking at the very first stars
that were formed after the Big Bang,
the first galaxies, and even seeing how stars
and planets are formed.
- We can see how science and engineering work together,
each one taking turns pushing the other.
What is the role that science discovery plays
in pushing exploration?
- So science and engineering actually work
very close together to develop new missions.
We have new questions and insight
that we really want to probe in space.
So we go to our engineers and we ask them to develop
and come up with new, innovative ways that we can
actually look for things in the deepest, darkest
realms of space at sensitivities
and capabilities that we've never had before.
- And how does engineering design
push scientific knowledge further?
- Us engineers, once we receive the requests
from the scientists, we work on a plan
to be able to make that a reality.
There might be some things that they want
where the technology's not available yet
so we have to put a proposal
to see how we can move the technology forward
in order to meet their needs.
- I think science and technology work closely together.
We really want to make sure that we're achieving
the best science that we can at the state of the art
capabilities that we can.
So we really push our engineers to help us
come up with innovative ways to really probe the unknown.
- There you have it.
Science and technology are dancing together.
Sometimes science leads and sometimes technology leads,
but at the end of the day, the partnership between the two
helps to make history and change the world.
All right, that's it for now.
I'm Derrick with NASA Launchpad.
See ya next time.
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