The James Webb Space Telescope is going to “fly” into the USA Science and Engineering Festival on April 26 and 27 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. EDT at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. to show visitors the amazing capabilities of the next-generation space telescope and other NASA missions. A special symposium on April 24 will feature speakers who will discuss the construction progress of the Webb.
NASA, the Northrop Grumman Foundation and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) will have booths with exhibits that display the science and engineering behind missions including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb telescope and unmanned NASA Global Hawk aircraft.
The Festival Expo is a free, family-friendly event with more than 3,000 hands-on activities and 100 live stage performances. Taking over the entire convention center, the Festival Expo will also have a Career Pavilion, Book Fair —complete with signings by well-known science authors — and multiple workshops and competitions, making it the “Super Bowl” of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).
At the Festival’s X-STEM Symposium on Thursday, April 24, Scott Willoughby, Northrop Grumman’s vice president and Webb program manager and Blake Bullock, Civil Air and Space director for Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems Business and Advanced Systems Development will speak to middle and high school students about the science, manufacturing, and technology of the Webb. This event, presented by the Northrop Grumman Foundation and MedImmune will be held at 11:55 a.m. EDT at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
At NASA’s Booth, visitors will be able to handle pieces of the Webb telescope like the sunshield, see hands on demonstrations using an infrared camera like the ones that will fly aboard the Webb, and see a video showing the Webb telescope unfolding out of a rocket that is smaller than the telescope. Once in space, the Webb telescope will unfold into a 3-story tall structure with a sunshield the size of a tennis court!
Visitors will also be able to meet and talk with NASA scientists, engineers and educators at the booth. Student activities will include a Star Cycle Bookmarker, where visitors can assemble the life cycle of a star onto a bookmark, using beads to represent a generic star’s life cycle from its birth in a nebula, through its dramatic death, changing color and size as its temperature and composition evolve.
Visitors can get up close and personal with a Webb telescope virtual experience called the Virtual Immersive Portal Environment (VIPE) Holodeck™ at Northrop Grumman’s booth. The VIPE Holodeck™ is 270-degree will be configured as a 270-degree room for visitors to stand in and have a hands-on, interactive learning experience with Webb and NASA’s Global Hawk. Visitors can select a mission, go through the checklist and interact with visuals that tell the story. For the Webb scenario, they can launch Webb in to space on the Ariane 5 rocket and watch it deploy on its path to L2 (1 million miles from Earth). Then they can point it into deep space, and see infrared images just as Webb will see. The booth will also feature an infrared camera demo so that students can see what infrared vision looks like. The Northrop Grumman Foundation is a major sponsor of the festival.
Astronomers and education experts from STScI will present the latest dramatic images from the Hubble Space Telescope, including a sparkling stellar cluster, a collision between galaxies, and the colorful birthplaces of stars. The experts will explain how space telescopes let us explore the universe to find black holes, ancient galaxies, and planets orbiting other stars. Hands-on activities with light and color will demonstrate how astronomers use starlight. Visitors will see a preview of what astronomers hope to learn from Hubble’s successor, the Webb telescope. Based at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., STScI is the science operation center for Hubble and the upcoming Webb space telescope.
The Webb telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
For more information about the USA Science and Engineering Festival, visit:
http://www.usasciencefestival.org/
Lynn Chandler
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Lynn.chandler-1@nasa.gov
301-286-2806
Christina Thompson
Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, Redondo Beach, Calif.
christina.thompson@ngc.com
310-812-2375
Ray Villard
Space Science Telescope Institute, Baltimore, Md.
villard@stsci.edu
410-338-4514