Times Observer photo by Brian Ferry John Mangus, whose optical career with NASA spanned six decades, has been involved in the development of the James Webb Space Telescope since it was an idea. The JWST launched Christmas morning from the European Spaceport in French Guiana.

Amid the hustle and bustle of Christmas morning, many eyes across the country were looking not at the Christmas tree but to South America.

Shortly after 7 a.m. an Ariane 5 rocket launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

It’s payload? The James Webb Space Telescope which, if everything works, will help humanity understand how stars and galaxies were formed in the wake of the Big Bang.

John Mangus was one of those with eyes on South America. For him, Webb is a capstone to a six decade career in optical engineering.

More likely known here for his involvement with the Hubble Space Telescope, Mangus led the branch at NASA that developed the agency’s optical capabilities starting in the late 1960s and that culminated in missions such as Hubble and Webb.

Born and raised in Warren, Mangus worked at Goddard Space Flight Center for nearly 30 years before he and his wife, Louise, retired back to Warren in the mid-1990s.

In retirement, he continued to work on various review committees and teams for the agency, most recently in 2018 as part of the Webb Optical Product Integrity Team which ensured that the testing protocols were in place to certify the primary mirror segments for flight.

He was on those teams because he was one of very few with the expertise to develop cryogenic instruments, meaning they operated remarkably close to absolute zero – -459 degrees fahrenheit.

It’s taken decades to bring the project from a concept to launch and John has had a hand in the effort since the beginning.

The telescope is being placed in an orbit one million miles from earth and it’ll be months before we know whether everything works as it should.

While he watched the launch, that’s not where he sees the challenges of this mission.

“Deployments are really the nail-biting parts,” he said.

Because of limits of what can be mounted on top of a rocket, the primary mirror is actually 18 smaller mirrors that are folded to fit in the launch shroud – think of it as a butterfly in a cocoon. 178 mechanisms, he said, will all have to work.

He’s concerned about the electrical cables that won’t be deployed until very late in the mission. “It’s very cold. Something that was real pliable… when it gets very cold becomes very stiff.” Cracking is a possibility that he’s experienced in past missions “but we caught it in testing. Hopefully they’ve caught it in modules for this mission.”

He’s also concerned about the sunshield – five layers of a material called Kapton, according to NASA, ransing in thickness from .05 millimeters to .025 millimeters and covering the size of a tennis court.

“The mission is over” if there is a tear or it doesn’t deploy properly.

According to NASA, Webb’s focus is collecting light from when the very first stars and galaxies formed over 13.5 billion years ago. It’ll also study objects much closer to us, looking for possible habitability.

But for Mangus the exciting part is what we don’t know we’ll find.

“I expect we’ll have some surprises,” he said. With Hubble, “no one had any idea” there were black holes at the center of every galaxy. It was, to some degree, an incidental discovery. He knows astronomers want to find exoplanets but “I’m frankly more interested in Titan in our Solar System.” That moon of Saturn’s has been a focal point in the search for signs of life in the Solar System.

And, yes, Mangus has been involved in multiple missions there, too.

But Webb is the “most complicated and most demanding one I ever worked on, because we worked in the nanometer” tolerances. For reference sake, a sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick.

“Try building something to those tolerances. It’s really been a challenge,” he said. “Failure is not acceptable. You’re not allowed to fail.”

Nail biting, however, is OK – he said there will be a lot of that in the weeks and months to come.

Should everything work, though the telescope will “fill in the blank pages between the cosmic background radiation and what Hubble could look back to; how these very distinct galaxies (form). (We) will have a whole history from beginning to now.”