“Like a giant model rocket, it goes boom and it’s gone,” says University of Colorado, Boulder Professor Jim Green in explaining his early work with solid fuel missiles at the White Sands Missile Range, the United States Army military testing area and firing range in New Mexico.
Green has experienced a front-row seat on the assembly, deployment, and maintenance of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and witnessed the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has enough fuel for another 20 years, assuming it’s not overtaken by micrometeorites. Green was the Principal Investigator for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which was the final instrument installed in the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2009.
In fact, thanks to 19 years of upgrades and repairs to the Hubble, and in spite of hundreds of potential failures during the deployment of the James Webb, both observatories are producing excellent science and are predicted to continue to operate for many more years, sharing astounding images of the universe.
Professor Green explained what we’ve learned so far from these technological advancements in space science, with a focus on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope that was designed and built in Boulder by the University of Colorado and Ball Aerospace.
Throughout his career, he preferred using a drafting board, not CAD, to design instruments before handing them over to mechanical engineers to prepare it for launch.
He says the Webb isn’t necessarily better than the Hubble, “it just sees different stuff…. One telescope can’t do it all.”
Green tipped members off to the planned Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx), a mission to directly image planetary systems around Sun-like stars, expected to launch in the early 2040s. It will directly image Earth-like exoplanets, and identify their atmospheric content.
Professor Green received his B.S. in Physics from Stanford University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. He has spent his career designing and building instrumentation for space astronomy applications and analyzing data from such instruments.
View his May 31, 2023 talk here:
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YouTube video link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoQmvcG-Xzg