Parts for Revolutionary Telescope Built in Moorestown

If (or when) astronomers uncover the mysteries surrounding the origins of the universe, a small team of technicians and experts in Moorestown will know they played an integral part in the discovery.

Just a few weeks ago,  completed the yearlong process of gold-coating the mirrors for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Once completed, the James Webb—successor to the famed Hubble Telescope—will be the largest, most powerful telescope in the world, able to see farther into space and with greater detail than previous telescopes, primarily because of its ability to capture infrared light. 

On the website dedicated to the James Webb program, NASA explains the telescope will “look much closer to the beginning of time and to hunt for the unobserved formation of the first galaxies,” as well as investigating the potential for life in other planetary systems.

“This is far and away the biggest, most exciting, most prestigious” project that Quantum has been involved in in recent memory, said the director of coating, Ian Stevenson. “It’s right at the forefront of technology.”

Quantum was awarded the contract to apply the gold coating—which enhances the amount of light reflected and focused into the telescope—in 2007, but did not begin the actual application of the gold coating until last year, Stevenson said. 

It took about a week to coat each of the 18 segments of the telescope’s primary mirror—the mirror is roughly 21 feet across—and the segments didn’t arrive all at once, he said, so the process of coating took about a year. 

The technicians at Quantum had to build a customized coating chamber to accommodate the procedure. Within the chamber, they were able to vaporize gold by heating it to an extremely high temperature, where it then condensed on the surface of the mirror.

In order to visualize the process, Stevenson provided a simple, helpful analogy: “If you boil a kettle of water till you get steam, and you hold a glass in front of it, the steam condenses on the glass.”

Quantum has been involved in several NASA projects before—though their primary source of business is producing flat-panel displays for airplane cockpits—but this one was special, for a number of reasons, said president Dan Patriarca.

He said the mirrors cost several million dollars each, so pressure was high on the staff to get it right—and get it right the first time.

“In particular when we first started, sure, everyone was sensitive. Every miscue’s going to be seen by everybody in the scientific community,” he said. “We never let ourselves get too relaxed. (Our team) did a fantastic job.”

He said Quantum’s coating passed muster with “100 percent acceptability:” zero mistakes, zero problems.

James Webb isn’t set to launch until 2018, and has recently come under threat of having its funding plug pulled by the U.S. House of Representatives for its $6 billion-plus price tag.

But should the telescope launch, and should it achieve its goal of looking “deep into space to look back in time” to the origins of the universe, as NASA states, the nine-person team involved in the project at Quantum will know it wouldn’t have been possible without them.

“It’s very gratifying,” Patriarca said. “We’re very proud to be part of what is turning out to be a very prestigious program.”