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[Music throughout][Tale of Two Telescopes:

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Hubble Space Telescope and WFIRST. Engineering]

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Tim Wilson: So my name is Tim Wilson, and I am the optics operations

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lead at L3 Harris Technologies for our

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imaging division that’ part of

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space and airborne system. Jeanette Domber: My name is Jeanette Domber,

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and currently I am the deputy program manager

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for the work that Ball Aerospace is doing on the Wide Field Instrument for

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WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Tim: Kodak, which was

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the owner of the division that I’m in with L3 Harris

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now, they had gotten a contract to make the

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backup primary mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope, and

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they were working on that project starting in about 1979,

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1980. and that’s when I graduated from college and joined

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the company. Jeanette: So I primarily worked on Hubble Servicing Mission 4.

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I joined the team in late 2006, after the reinstatement of the

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human servicing mission, and I got to support the mission through on-orbit

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operations in May of 2010. Tim: I joined the WFIRST team

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here in 2014. Jeanette: I have been working on

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WFIRST for, I think about 4 years now.

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I started on that program when Ball was in the pursuit phase

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to win a role on the program, so I got to work on some of the early

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studies that we did for NASA. And we have been

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on-contract for parts of the Wide Field Instrument since

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May of 2018. Tim: The specifications are about the

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same for the mirrors, but today the technology and the

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precision that we can measure those

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parameters in the mirror is much better than it was in

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1980. I mean back then we didn’t have desktop computers. we had

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a lot of computer data programs that were running off of punch cards,

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and Fortran programs and things like that. Today, the

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technology and the test systems that we have gets us lots more data,

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a lot more precision and knowledge about the performance

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of the mirror surface. Jeanette: I got to move up into the

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lead role for the STIS repair work at Ball

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for Hubble, and it was a really great opportunity to really learn

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systems engineering. I had had some taste of that when I was in

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graduate school, but then I got work on it on a real program on Hubble.

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You know, I was responsible for making sure that all aspects of the repair

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that we were working came together and we delivered the hardware that the

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astronauts could install to do that “open heart surgery” in

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space. And then, when I started on WFIRST,

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even though there was a gap between those two, I had transitioned from

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structural engineering into systems engineering. Tim: To manufacture

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something that precise, the lessons

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that I learned with the Hubble team, as we went through that, and

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that we’ve used and applied and refined over time,

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have been really the important thing, you know, for my career.

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that’s been fundamental. Jeanette: When we put together our WFIRST

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team we really made sure that we channeled some of the things that we had learned on Hubble

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to make sure that we had that team that was excited to work on

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a mission like WFIRST together.

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[Explore]

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[NASA]

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