Uplink 60: The James Webb Space Telescope: Getting ready for space and science!

Join us this Thursday, 11th November when we’ll be joined by ESA experts Kate Underhill and Sarah Kendrew who will walk us through the incredibly important and exciting launch of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, what’ll happen during as the observatory deploys and is commissioned over the following six months, and what JWST will mean for space science. We’ll be live from 8 pm GMT/9 pm CET /3 pm ET.

Following on from the enormously influential Hubble Space Telescope, NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency have been collaborating since 1996 on the design and construction of a scientifically-worthy successor. Due to be launched on December 18th aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the next great space science observatory, expected to have as profound and far-reaching an impact on astrophysics as did its famous predecessor. With a much larger primary mirror than Hubble and designed to work at infrared wavelengths, JWST should answer some of the outstanding questions about the Universe and make breakthrough discoveries in many fields of astronomy, seeing farther into our origins: from the birth of new stars and planets in our Milky Way today, to the atmospheres of planets orbiting alien stars, and all the way to the formation of the first galaxies in the early Universe more than 13.5 billion years ago.

Kate Underhill will be familiar to Space Rocks live fans due to her brilliant and engrossing talk on rocket science at Space Rocks London in 2019. With an undergrad thesis on space propulsion and an MSc in specialised space engineering, Kate landed her first job as a young graduate trainee in the propulsion department at ESA’s ESTEC in the Netherlands. She is now an engineer working on future propulsion systems for ESA, based in Paris.

Sarah Kendrew is an Instrument & Calibration Scientist with the European Space Agency, working on the MIRI instrument on JWST. She is based at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, from where the JWST will be operated. Sarah is an expert in optical/infrared astronomical instrumentation and technology, and has worked on several major international instruments for observatories on the ground and in space. Her interests in astrophysics research include exoplanets, the early Universe, and everything in between.

We’ll be live from 8 pm GMT/9 pm CET /3 pm ET. Set yourself a reminder at https://youtu.be/TUwHyV7WVWo