JWST, LUVOIR and Mind-blowing Future Projects with Lee Feinberg, Optical Telescope Element Manager 

Great episode! Feinberg's expertise and technical info about the JWST is absolutely fascinating! This channel is much more than the best science reporting. It's an oasis of calm and intelligence. Fraser and his guests represent the best part of RU-vid- the part that values our collective desire to know more about our world, our universe and our better place in it.

This guy makes me glad to pay my taxes. Love the transparency and his obvious real interest in what he does. This is the kind of thinking that will get us somewhere. Thank you.

Great interview! This gave me a better understanding of what JWST is about than anything I had heard before. Every day they must must have to shake themselves again to realize that they really did it.

I love these engineering oriented interviews Fraser. While the science the telescope is doing is amazing, I would argue (at least from an engineer's viewpoint) that how the telescope came together and operates is much cooler. Pun intended. It's like you mentioned in the video, we are coming up against the limits of physics more than the limits of engineering. I think that really says it all as to what an accomplishment this telescope really is. Thank you and Lee for the interview!

The images and the data that have already come from the JWST is mind-blowing. I’m looking forward to see what other discoveries they find over the next few years … the scientists will be kept busy. Great interview Fraser!

This got increasingly nerdy and fascinating as it progressed. Great conversation

Fantastic interview/conversation that it was my pleasure to tune into.... Thank you, Fraser and Lee!

Question: Can you talk about the challenges of capturing light from exoplanets and really dim stars? Like, I understand that sometimes we're talking about capturing a handful of photons per hour, which makes the function and design of these machines absolutely mind-blowing! Can you also talk about the workflow of how the data is stored onboard, how it's processed (is it compressed?) and the schedule and planning that goes to send the information back to Earth (the software - what options are there?, the infrastructure, how it's stored back on Earth before processing, etc). Something you hardly hear about! Thanks Fraser!

This is such a great interview! Lee’s enthusiasm really shines through his stories of all the engineering challenges of creating JWST, and maximizing the benefit now that it is operational. Awesome stuff Fraser!

Great interview. Just found this channel, already one of my favorites.

Really, I would take the time to hit the like button hundreds of times for this interview, if I had the option.

Great subject and even better interview! Thank you!

The Keck observatory seems to be doing visible light interferometry. That is, between two fairly close, stable, telescopes. More on that would be interesting.

Excellent interview! Thank you

That was a fantastic interview!! Amazing stuff

What a fascinating look into the incredibly complex decisions in preparing such a wonderful scientific machine. I enjoyed this conversation immensely. Thank you.

"the guy that bought the bird company" - that's my new favorite nickname for him

I like the positive energy from this man, and of course i love the talk, thank you both very much for this quality time for a layman Astro-everything, and 42yrs old stargazer from Montenegro!

I love this guy. So passionate, and he achieved such a high level of success. How extremly proud he culd be. I always felt James Webb is pretty close to the limit of the present level of technology, with all these new stuffs, and he nailed all of them. And he is workin on a brand new thing. Extreme. We might need to name the next telescope to Lee Feinberg :D

Remarkable interview... so glad I found your channel Fraser!

38:00 ok im still having trouble wrapping my head around why it’s better to look one direction. am I correct that you get hit about the same amount looking any direction but you get hit harder when looking forward in the orbit? If so why? My intuition is that fast objects coming from the outer solar system would hit the trailing side more.

I like these introductions to the interviews, to know what I'm getting myself into lol

The amount of technology that will emerge from this quest would be mind-blowing.

Amazing. I'd like to read a transcript, edited for ease of consumption but undiluted. So much information in there.

Another classic timeless interview. Brilliant!

wow. this was amazing. thanks FC!

One of the most interesting interviews I have watched in a long time. A long time.

Fascinating interview, thank you!

this guy is really passionate about what amounts to his life's work. This whole interview was really good. And the problem solving that is ongoing. Just riveting visions of the future.

Hooray for James Webb

Excellent interview. Ty

you listen to this gentleman from JWTS project, and realize just how much you dont understand. And I have spent 35 years in engineering and physics. been studying space for 40 years. I listen to my son who has a bachelors in aerospace engineering, summa cum laude. at 21y.o. He tries to explain some things and I know hes simplifying for me but, dang man. I get that feeling with him and I know hes dumbing it down for us.

4 NOV 2022 - You and Lee Feinberg gave one of the most interesting science interviews EVER!! A must see for Astronomy telescope minded folks. PS...I worked as a Serviceability Engineer. Maybe I can consult for the next space serviceable designs. Thanks again!

I like your new interview format where you pre-record the interview, and then give an intro summary at the start.

Listened to the whole interview - the interviewer is a great, well, interviewer. The ability to listen is not next level - it's beyond the next level. Listened to the whole interview in background, if it was possible for me to get excited about the new JWST - well, now I am. Greetings from Latvia and thanks for the amazing and rivetting stuff. Good luck!

Wow, incredible interview

Amazing the plans they have.

👍 great video !👌

Thanks!

I wish I grew up hanging around with people like this.

Loved the part about optical interferometry and quantum communication.

I loved this interview.

I would like to see the "schedule": Daily, Weekly, Monthly? Would their be value in a large radio telescope at L2?

Wow, that was great! I would love to see what quantum computing would do for ground telescopes.

This was out of control! Everyone you interview is such a delight. How do you come up with and narrow down the questions you ask?

Thanks Fraser your interview kicked ass

When I first hear the initial lifespan of JWST being only a few years I thought that was crazy but now knowing how insanely productive it is odds are this thing will get more done in its few short years than we could have from decades of Hubble and I love it.

QUESTION: Is it possible for you to replay this interview in sections where you elaborate some of the explanations e.g physical stability metrics, thermal stability methods/strategies, and more. Fascinating, but I need to understand done of the fabrication science.

Quantum space telescope array sounds really awesome hope they build it.

I’m keen to see what JWST finds about Trappist 1

The vibe I get from other focuses on his work,(ie. Serviceable satellites and other interesting comments) leads me to think he's now working for defense dept b heading into space drones, beyond what we have now; satellite/warhead killers

Yay, just want I felt like watching 🎉

Q: Am curious.. how long does it take to move/slew JWST from one target to the next, i.e. from stopping collecting light at one target to collecting light at the new target?

Fantastic interview! Quanta Extraction Telescopes! You have got to get him back on, to *just* talk through this idea, from soup to nuts.

CEO of I don’t think people appreciate the signal to noise. Great interview!

So Webb's first Deep Field was a few hours compared to Hubble's. I wonder what it might look like if they had just kept it there for as long as Hubble... I realize that time is limited, but still... Will they ever go back for another look-see?

This will have to reviewed a few times for me so much good info nocking cobwebs lol ty

The amount of content you do is almost unbelievable. You must really love your job! Thanks for all your work, I’ve been listening to you since before the Obama administration.

Amazing video. Technology just keeps moving forward. ??s What spectrum telescope (perhaps IR) would be best to help look for the mystery 9th planet that we have gravitational evidence of. Could the JW telescope help in that search?

Got lucky this time. Keep sending them up😈

Lee Feinberg -- It is good to hear an engineering perspective. I have a concern. There are a few madmen on the planet who have the means to harm this major investment in time, money, brain power, political will... you name it. This is a major accomplishment for the US, the EU, and other Western partners. Would a political enemy and competitor on the world stage see JWST as the perfect target to strike out against our politics, our tech, our system & science, or just to make a statement? If so, what should we be doing about this now?

I just realised the hiring processes for projects like jwst must be super interesting.

QUESTION: What is it about each Le Grange point the causes it to be nearly gravitationally flat? I can understand being between two objects where the attractions are balanced but this does not seem to be the case for all Le Grange points.

wow what a great show really enjoyed it

Added thoughts.... aside from the JWST etc... this is a good example of why one would want to be an engineer! My education was physics but now at the end of my life I think I should have been an engineer of some sort.... or combine the two disciplines. Just a thought. Alot of levels of thinking beyond the basics... Thank you this was so stimulating.

Is there any consideration of a event horizon telescope style project with multiple elements spread widely, for example at different lagrangian points, giving a huge baseline with relatively small mirrors? There would be a lot of difficulties in execution, obviously, but could it be worth it?

I've spent quite a good deal of time thinking about space interferometers and see one significant difficulty that isn't discussed here; namely, that although the "theoretical" angular resolving power of an interferometer is a merely a function of the maximum widths of the separations among the various telescopes providing the data to be "interfered," the ratio of the total area of the individual telescopes utilized divided by the total area of a circular approximation of the "theoretical" interferometer as a whole is generally very small. This means that in general it is not possible to produce anything like a high-resolution image of the object at all, at least from that data alone. This is why most radio telescope arrays, like the old VLA, not only do not have individual telescopes located at distances, say, hundreds or thousands of times greater than the apertures of the telescopes. It is also why most such arrays have their telescopes on railroad tracks, or something equivalent, in order to put them into configurations which can concentrate them greatly near one central location, or spread them out so that they serve to form ever larger theoretical interferometer apertures. When the fringes from several different such separations are assembled, and "deconvolved" by a computer, one can indeed build up a -- usually rather moth-eaten appearing -- "image" of the object being observed. [That is actually rather amazing itself in some ways!] Being able to change the separations and and relative locations of the constituent telescopes making up such an interferometer in SPACE, however, it at least seems to me, will be very tricky for all but the simplest configurations of, say 2 to 4 telescope components. Thus a space-based interferometer built as a kind of "eye in the sky" variant of the VLA would need to be able to keep all their components coherently aligned with respect to one another to an accurate precision of nanometers [or perhaps perhaps even picometers?] over separation distances of several kilometers. And that difficulty will only be compounded by needing to frequently reconfigure the entire array, not only for a usable image of each object observed, but also, a fortiori, to move the entire system in order to observe the next object on the list. Maybe these problems are not as difficult to solve as my hardly very well honed "intuitions" lead me to believe, but that is hardly obvious to me.

Why is the sun shield attached to the telescope? Would it be more effective separated.

The quantum ‘metadata’ is super interesting! I hope I’m still alive to see something like that 🤣

OMG! I was just going to make some snarky comment about how these programs really should have a disclaimer warning about the potential danger of blowing your mind, when I looked up and saw the mind-blowing potential stated clearly in the title. Truth in titles. Love it

With that quantum imaging in mind, we should create a visual version of the Voyager 1 gold record that is visible from space. Just in case an alien looks our way a million or so years from now.

From an amateur astronomer, this was a wonderful and very insightful discussion. Is an origami designed instrument being considered?

Re: 14:07, a couple days ago is 2 days ago. While etymologically a couple could be considered to mean a group fastened together, the English known couple is traditionally specifically defined as a group of two.

Literally nothing but science and engineering was spat from this dude’s mouth. Good talk.

QUESTION--Interesting that the JWST is also design to image Exo-planets, and to see their signature of elements light years away,-- but have they consider imaging Europa or other moons of Jupiter/Saturn, as it is known to be a prime (possible) source of life in their eruptions there that is only 40mins/1.2hrs away at Lspeed?? They could save--Hundreds of millions of $$ of sending a spacecraft to fly thru it as they intend to do so, versus having the JWST just do a top quality image of it first hand from space. I'm missing something here?? Or they plan to image them in near future?

How often does JWST orbit the L2 La Grange point, and what is its orbital diameter?

Hubble is amazing, maybe upgrade it with every spectrum and put a cockpit and cabin on it.

P.S. Dear Frasier, Will you be having anyone from the STScI as guests? Thank you.

What does Lee mean by noise being a problem?

I was just wondering how Lee Feinberg and his team overcome the 5 seconds each way lag on command and response times during the steering/slewing of JWST. I would imagine that overcoming inertial problems would be a real problem.

Loved this interview. So exciting. As for quantum stuff - the more I learn the less I seem to understand!

how cheap would be to build another jwst copy, since its already developed? isnt there a budget case for making 2x of a developed device? or even more?

Regarding large telescopes cost - There's a rule of thumb amoung telescope builders Doubling the aperture drives the cost about x10 So if the ok average 8-10 inch newtonian telescope goes for about 1000$, this formula nicely scales for several meters telescopes.

What mag would it be? 😅

I wonder is there a case for a very large telescope on the far side of the Moon. This having the advantage that it would be maintainable and upgradable indefinitely.

Fraser, why have we not been able to find any information on which side of Earth was in the direct line of fire at the time of the Oct 9, 2022 gamma ray burst? Or, is it that GRBs are so powerful that the effects are global and that it didn’t matter?

So we’re gonna find ways to see places that we’ll never reach. I’m trying to figure out how that’s gonna be practical because it seems more like an indulgence than a necessity.

THis is part was not added in previous comment-- Interesting that the JWST is also design to image Exo-planets, and to see their signature of elements light years away,-

How much redundancy is built into Webb. Should that be a bigger priority in future satellites. Also robotic systems and replicable parts. Considering the location and cost of Webb.

I suggest using assembly technology to create a giant baffled mirror that shields anything in the wake direction for other instruments to follow behind at the L2 lagrange. Simple really. Build the "landing pad" first. Over

That hit was during our fancy meteor storm

I did a rough order of magnitude estimate for that wonderful and hopefully possible idea to view exoplanets. I estimate it takes 1 month to collect the photons for a 1-mega-pixel image of an earth 10 light years away. And the error bar in my estimate is a factor 10 at least. Didn't bother with albedo or anything. Just a very rough estimate. I was assuming 10 satellites with 10-m2 mirrors.

Why not have the sun shield be a separate space craft?

The PARTICLE TRAIN! Previously I suggested that eternal photons made electron positron pairs, (as well as all standard model particles). Here's how. Start with a PARTICLE TRAIN, each time you add an electron or positron car to the train, you get a new particle. The only rule is the cars have to alternate from electron to positron. Think of a wave with trough always alternating with crest. Photons as electron positron pairs could make the main parts of an atom in the brief time after the Big Bang under those extreme and never repeated conditions. Charges are the cars on our particle train. Positive positron (+), Negative electron (-). Positron (+) Electron (-) Photon (+) (-) Proton (+) (-) (+) Anti Proton (-) (+) (-) Neutron (+) (-) (+) (-) Anti Neutron (-) (+) (-)(+) . The PROTONS and NEUTRONS are made from ELECTRONS and POSITRONS! When this production of particles was over, most anti particles with charge; positrons, and anti protons, didn't exist on their own. They were LOCKED INTO PROTONS OR NEUTRONS. That way conservation of charge was maintained. That also explains the MISSING ANTI MATTER PROBLEM! This from Wikipedia article Matter Creation: It is possible to create all fundamental particles in the standard model, including quarks, leptons and bosons using photons of varying energies above some minimum threshold, whether directly (by pair production), or by decay of the intermediate particle (such as a W− boson decaying to form an electron and an electron-antineutrino).

its ferry expertise that we vind the new world in space

Question: Could alien civilizations be using quantum entangled cosmic rays to probe the universe?

I joined AARP 25 years ago. A senior citizen a long long time. Science curious all my life. JWST a stunning achievement. But it just produces eye candy stunning pictures, and an expensive employment opportunity. Please spend some trying to explain how esoteric science boffins will work for humanity in general. Or help pay my water bill.

launching something as valuable as jwst on a rocket is madness. modular assemble in space is definitely the way to go.

If we can do interferometry with Radio Telescopes why not use the same technology with optical since it is all EM radiation just different parts of the sepctrum?

any blue shifted objects of interest?