When Rebecca Espina was a kid in Summit County, she wanted nothing more than to leave the ski slopes far, far behind and become an astronaut.

Since the dawn of the space program, millions of students have shared that dream, and like those science-minded youngsters, Espina was endlessly fascinated by the mysteries of outer space. In the 1980s and early 90s, space stations were all the rage and Espina then Rebecca Hage saw an opportunity to delve into the nitty-gritty mechanics of space exploration.

I was very interested in becoming an astronaut, says Espina, whose family moved to Summit County when she was in the fifth grade. There were a lot of concepts out there about building space stations, and at that point, even with Hubble, the idea was that astronauts were going out and building things. I wanted to be a construction worker in space.

Espina never made a trip to low-Earth orbit, home of the International Space Station and the majority of satellites, but she found a way to be part of the select group perfecting NASAs next big thing: the James Webb Space Telescope, a massive, 14,300-pound instrument that will replace the 25-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.

On Tuesday, Espina will give a presentation to the Rotary Club of Summit County about JWST, the intricacies of space exploration and her life after leaving Summit County. In 1992, she won scholarships through the Rotary Club and several other local organizations that helped her go from Summit High School valedictorian to the University of Colorado-Boulders aerospace engineering program and, finally, to her current home at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

At Goddard, Espina is one of more than 1,000 scientists from 17 countries working on JWST, the newest and most complex satellite NASA has ever built. And it has to be: Once its launched in 2018, it will sit in whats called an L2 orbit, roughly 1.5 million kilometers above Earth. Thats past the moon, which will make JWST the remotest telescope ever launched.

The distance also makes it difficult to maintain. For most of its life, Hubble was regularly repaired and updated by teams of two to three astronauts on space shuttle missions Espinas dream as a child. But when the shuttle program was discontinued in 2011, NASA engineers no longer had a way to maintain the aging telescope.

The solution for JWST is to over-engineer every component. Since astronauts can no longer replace and repair parts on a regular basis, the telescope is built to survive at least 10 years in J2 orbit, operating in temperatures of less than 50 degrees above absolute zero, or roughly negative-370 Fahrenheit.

With Hubble, we could replace batteries, replace solar panels, change and fix parts, Espina says. But this telescope (JWST) will be so far out to do its work that we cant reach it for service. It will be much larger and much more complicated than Hubble.

BUILDING A BETTER TELESCOPE

Read the original here:

To infinity and beyond! Summit woman working on telescope to replace Hubble