One in every of a telescope operator’s main jobs is to maintain any stray mild out of the instrument. Earthly and different unwelcome photons can swamp the cosmic mild from distant stars and galaxies. Throughout greater than a decade as a challenge scientist for the James Webb House Telescope, Jane Rigby obsessed over minimizing mild leaks — with extraordinary success. The sky appears darker to JWST than most anybody had hoped.
Rigby herself, now the senior challenge scientist for JWST, is a supply of sunshine.
“I keep in mind the sunshine in her eyes,” says astrophysicist Jane Charlton, who met Rigby the summer season earlier than her freshman yr at Penn State and later suggested her analysis. “Jane had unbelievable grades, however that’s not essentially what I search for. The love of astronomy, and fervour for that, is what I search for.”
Practically three a long time later, Rigby’s palpable pleasure in discussing the success of JWST, which launched on December 25, 2021, has made her one of many public faces of the telescope. She offered the telescope’s first pictures on the White Home and has given keynote speeches at a number of the greatest astronomy conferences (SN: 8/13/22, p. 30). Throughout public appearances, she typically wears JWST-themed socks, scarves and pins. “I’ve JWST socks for just about day by day of the week,” she says.
She has additionally lit a path for queer astronomers, in addition to others who’re traditionally underrepresented in astronomy. Rigby has been out as a part of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood since 2000, when she met her now-wife once they had been each astronomy graduate college students on the College of Arizona in Tucson. She has devoted a lot of her profession to holding the door open for others.
“I didn’t develop up with any queer position fashions,” she says. “I hope I’m the final technology for which that’s true.”
Specializing in the devices
Rigby remembers being requested to attract a favourite TV present in preschool. She used up a whole black crayon drawing Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
Her curiosity in area crystallized right into a profession plan at about age 12, after she noticed Sally Trip converse at a neighborhood school. Trip, the primary American lady in area, made Rigby wish to be an astronaut.
“I knew there have been two paths to turning into an astronaut: a take a look at pilot or a scientist,” she says. “And it was fairly clear that I used to be by no means going to be tall sufficient to fly the shuttle.” At 5 ft, 2 inches tall, she’s nonetheless two inches too quick to have been an area shuttle pilot. If she couldn’t make it to area, she noticed extra potential in science than in flying planes.
Rigby’s first expertise utilizing a telescope for analysis, as an undergraduate scholar at Penn State, was stymied by mild leaks. She, Charlton and one other scholar traveled to western Texas to make use of the telescope on the McDonald Observatory. They had been trying to catch mild from a distant quasar filtering via a diffuse and mysterious cloud of cosmic gasoline. These small, dense clouds seem like filled with heavy components from supernova explosions, however surprisingly, they’re not present in galaxies’ facilities the place loads of stars are born and dying. “We had been, at the moment, attempting to determine what they had been,” Charlton says. “As we nonetheless are.”
After an evening of guiding the telescope by hand, the group realized that mild from one thing apart from the quasar — perhaps an alert mild on an instrument panel — had flooded the telescope. The trio tracked it down, lined it with tape and tried once more. The identical factor occurred night time after night time. Finally, they returned to Pennsylvania with no quasar knowledge.
“It didn’t work,” Rigby says. “However it was actually enjoyable. I used to be studying every thing, attempting to learn the way the telescope labored.”
Since then, Rigby has used many main telescopes, from these on the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to the Magellan telescopes in Chile to the Spitzer and Hubble area telescopes. Alongside the best way, her analysis developed a theme: investigating how galaxies develop and alter together with the tremendoushuge black holes hiding inside.
However her method is much less “How can I reply this burning query?” and extra “What can I do with this shiny new instrument?”
“I’m a really observational astronomer,” she says. “I’ll use any telescope I can get my palms on.”
All that telescope time meant she was prepared to affix the JWST staff when the chance got here.
“As a result of she had seen knowledge from Spitzer and Hubble,” JWST’s precursors, says astronomer Matt Mountain of the Affiliation of Universities for Analysis in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., “she knew what she was searching for.”
Assembly the James Webb House Telescope
Rigby started engaged on JWST in 2010, when she took a job at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Md., because the telescope’s deputy operations challenge scientist.
One of many first issues she did was learn the report of an unbiased overview panel that discovered that the telescope was mismanaged, over finances by billions of {dollars} and would launch years later than initially deliberate (SN: 11/11/10). “I’ve definitely been 4 years from launch a number of instances,” she says.
Earlier than launch, most of her time was devoted to creating certain that modifications to the telescope’s design wouldn’t mess up the science. She imagined potential methods to make use of JWST and met with different staff members to ensure the ultimate telescope would ship on these objectives. Would the telescope supplies glow or launch gases that would freeze to the machine? Might JWST use two cameras concurrently? Might it research transferring targets, like asteroids inside the photo voltaic system (SN: 11/5/22, p. 14)?
“As a result of she is a working scientist who actually needed to make use of the information,” Mountain says, “she was a perfect selection for operations scientist,” a job she moved as much as in 2018. “In these complicated areas, with all of the engineering, the personalities, the politics at NASA, working with contractors, she at all times retains her eye on the prize: What science are we attempting to do?”
Rigby bridged the divide between the science and engineering groups, serving to them converse a typical language. Her job has been “loads of lively listening and comfortable energy, loads of synthesizing and a dose of specialised technical experience,” she says. “Oftentimes I’m the big-picture particular person in a room stuffed with specialists.”
After the telescope launched, acquired in place and unfolded itself — “the six-month unwrapping of the Christmas current,” Rigby says — her job shifted to characterizing how effectively the telescope works. In virtually each metric, it’s a dream come true.
There’s better-than-expected picture high quality, increased sensitivity, sooner response instances and an extended potential mission lifetime than predicted earlier than launch — and virtually no mild leaks. The telescope’s nice golden mirrors are uncovered to area, and lightweight can scatter off mud grains on the mirrors, registering on pictures as faint, diffuse patterns the staff calls “wisps” and “claws,” or a ghostly streak dubbed “the lightsaber.” However the mirrors proved remarkably dust-free, that means the sky seems extremely darkish.
“It’s not an accident that the telescope works so effectively,” she says. “That was cautious work beforehand.”
When requested about such successes, and her personal, Rigby factors to an enormous quantity of labor by tens of hundreds of individuals. “I perceive the will to humanize one thing that may appear actually massive and impersonal. However I don’t just like the singling out,” she says. “I attempt to replicate it again to the staff.” It took hundreds of individuals and duties to make sure JWST’s success. Engineer Larkin Carey, with Ball Aerospace, for instance, cleaned each sq. centimeter of the telescope’s mirrors by hand with a device like a shaving brush, Rigby says.
With the telescope working so effectively, Rigby may flip her consideration to the scientific questions. She helps lead an observing program known as TEMPLATES, galaxies whose mild has been magnified by foreground objects to get a glimpse at how the galaxies type stars. At a June assembly in Albuquerque of the American Astronomical Society, Rigby shared how the TEMPLATES staff discovered hydrocarbons, “the identical stuff that smoke is product of,” in a galaxy whose mild dates again greater than 12 billion years — the furthest again in time such molecules had ever been seen.
Early in July, Rigby grew to become the senior challenge scientist for JWST; it’s her job to determine the way to get essentially the most and greatest science out of the telescope.
Analysis colleagues describe her as superhuman. “I don’t know the way she does every thing that she does, and does every thing effectively,” says TEMPLATES collaborator Keren Sharon of the College of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And Rigby’s enthusiasm is plentiful: “She will get giddy,” Sharon says. “It could possibly be about determining a bug, or discovering this tremendous thrilling factor a couple of galaxy that we didn’t know earlier than … and he or she’s actually bouncing. Her face lights up.”
Opening doorways for others
Rigby needs anybody to have the ability to expertise and pursue that enthusiasm. When she began attending American Astronomical Society conferences within the Nineteen Nineties, she didn’t know there was a secret LGBTQ+ networking dinner. “You needed to comprehend it existed. That was a bit of closety. However it’s the place individuals had been.”
On the time, there was an absence of safety from employment discrimination and no assure of institutional assist for astronomers with same-sex companions. Rigby remembers accepting a fellowship at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., and instantly having to request medical insurance advantages to cowl her associate.
“That’s awkward,” she says. “You wish to be speaking about your science and your telescope proposals, not how can I get medical insurance for my household as a result of we’re totally different.” Discovering different LGBTQ+ astronomers was “a lifeline,” she says.
Lately, the meet-up at AAS is just too massive to exit to dinner. At a January 2023 assembly in Seattle, “we misplaced depend at 120 individuals. We needed to spill out into the hallway,” Rigby says. “That feels good.”
Seeing queer astronomers like Rigby up to now alongside of their careers was useful to Traci Johnson, an information scientist who was a graduate scholar in astronomy in Sharon’s lab on the College of Michigan. Johnson identifies as lesbian and nonbinary and got here out throughout graduate faculty. “I noticed it’s potential to be out, and be joyful, and still have a extremely wonderful profession,” Johnson says.
Rigby has taken an lively position in encouraging inclusivity, although she appears to be up in opposition to the legacy of JWST’s namesake. Many astronomers have known as for the telescope to be renamed as a result of James Webb was NASA administrator at a time when the U.S. authorities fired workers for being homosexual.
Rigby received’t touch upon the telescope’s title. However her assist for LGBTQ+ astronomers is evident. Rigby was a founding member of the AAS Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy, which works to advertise equality for LGBTQ+ astronomers inside the discipline; has co-organized conferences on making astronomy extra inclusive; and authored a current white paper urging the astronomy neighborhood to handle variety, inclusion and harassment. A present precedence is ensuring trans individuals really feel protected and welcome.
Rigby doesn’t wish to be pigeonholed as “the homosexual astronomer.” She is aware of her contributions to astronomy lengthen far past any specific group. However she says the management abilities, resilience and skill to shift her perspective that she has realized via dwelling and organizing as a member of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood have made her a greater astronomer. They’re abilities she transfers to her position as a frontrunner at NASA.
“The entire imaginative and prescient is, you get to deliver your genuine self to work,” she says. “And work embraces your genuine self.”
