It took more than 20 years to build the James Webb Space Telescope, according to Prof. Rogier Windhorst, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) interdisciplinary scientist for the Webb telescope.

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On Thursday, September 1, Physics Meetup, the Philippines Project of the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers, launched “The Infrared Universe Beyond Hubble: The James Webb Telescope in 2022.” It is the first of the two lectures in the September series of the project initiated and hosted by the Central Mindanao University - Physics Department.

Speaker Prof. Rogier shared how he and his colleagues at NASA thought they would be done building the Webb in over 10 years, but they took much longer than that.

“They (NASA) actually started in 1996. I joined in 2001. And at that point, we thought we might be done in 10 years, but it took us another 21 years,” Prof. Rogier said.

He said they focused on the design of the Webb and made sure it was within budget from 2001 to 2009, and the actual building of the telescope started after that.

“These things take half a human career or call it a human life. It takes a lot of time to do these things,” he added.

After about 25 years of conceptualizing, designing, and building, the successful launch of the Webb into space happened on Christmas day of 2021.

Prof. Rogier said “it was the best Christmas present ever.” At the time, he was anxious about the launch because once it lifts off, “there is nothing you can do.”

“You want to never push that button if something isn’t quite right because you don’t get a second chance. These rockets have between two and five million gallons of fuel and once you light the candle, you must go,” he added.

When asked about the future of space telescopes, Prof. Rogier said it will take another 20 or 30 years to build a better space telescope than the Webb. He assured, however, that we have the technology, but “it just takes money, time, and people.”

And speaking of people, for his final remarks, Prof. Rogier hopes that many of the young people in the Physics Meetup audience will go into space science and someday work on the kind of technology he’s worked on.

A new brown algal genus from the eastern Pacific Ocean, Encephalophycus, was recently named by Filipino scientist Dr. Wilfred John E. Santiañez. The new genus was based on Colpomenia tuberculata, a species discovered and described by De Alton Saunders from California, USA in 1898.

Santiañez holds the record of having the most number of seaweed genera named by a Filipino scientist.