Northrop Grumman
NASA’s Webb Telescope Awarded Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy (News Release)
The team behind NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been selected to receive the 2023 Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy, the premier award from the National Space Club and Foundation. This annual award honors an individual, group or program deemed by the Club to have made the most significant contribution to space activity in the previous year.
The award will be presented at the Club’s yearly Dr. Robert H. Goddard Memorial Dinner in Washington on March 10, 2023.
In 2022, the Webb team successfully completed an intricate series of deployments to unfold the observatory into its final configuration in space. They then precisely aligned its mirrors to within nanometers, set up and tested its powerful instruments, and officially began Webb’s mission to explore the infrared universe.
With its optics performing nearly twice as well as the mission required, Webb has already spotted some of the earliest galaxies ever observed, peered through dusty clouds to see stars forming, and provided a more detailed look at the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system than ever before. The Goddard Trophy will recognize the contributions of the team that designed, developed and now operate Webb, including individuals from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland; Northrop Grumman, Redondo Beach, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore; and Ball Aerospace, Boulder, Colorado.
The mission was also made possible by many international contributions from partnerships with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
“Our team designed the James Webb Space Telescope to see the first lights that illuminated our universe,” said Mike Menzel, NASA Mission Systems Engineer for Webb at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This required the largest ‘first of its kind’ telescope ever put into space along with 50 of the most complex deployments ever attempted to essentially re-build it on-orbit. After all these many years and many engineering challenges our team was struck with awe and wonder at the first images, and the satisfaction of knowing that whatever is out there we will see it.”
Recent winners of the Goddard Memorial Trophy include the teams behind NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, New Horizons and Kepler mission.
Webb, an international mission led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), is the world’s premier space science observatory. Its design pushed the boundaries of space telescope capabilities to solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.
NASA Headquarters, Washington oversees the Webb Telescope mission. NASA Goddard manages Webb for the agency and oversees work on the mission performed by the Space Telescope Science Institute, Northrop Grumman and other mission partners.
In addition to Goddard, several NASA centers contributed to the project, including the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and others. Webb’s accomplishments have also recently been recognized by organizations including Aviation Week, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science and TIME.
Source: NASA.Gov
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ESA / Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team. Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt
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