Aug 24, 2012
Our guest today is
Neil Rowlands who joins Justin Trottier at The Star Spot to discuss
the engineering and science of the James Webb Space Telescope,
scheduled for launch in 2018. The two cover the exciting objects
and phenomena JWST will study, explore why the JWST is a vast
improvement over Hubble, and discuss how a project of this
magnitude is organized and managed. Dr. Rowlands also shares
insights from working in the private sector while under contract to
a government agency, before concluding with the current status and
upcoming milestones for this exciting project.
In Current in Space we ask whether space and time might not be
fundamental after all but rather emerged at the Big Bang. We then
detail some of the astronauts who have moved into the political
world including first Canadian in space Marc Garneau, now likely to
run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Finally, we
give tribute to a little world recently demoted to dwarf planet
status.
About Neil Rowlands
Neil Rowlands Neil
obtained his B.Sc (Engineering Physics) from the University of
Alberta and his Ph.D. (Astronomy) from Cornell University. At
Cornell, he participated in the construction and use of infrared
instrumentation for the Kuiper Airborne Observatory and the 5m Hale
telescope at Mt. Palomar.
He held NSERC post-doctoral fellowships at the Canada Centre for
remote sensing and another at the Université de Montréal
working with an infrared camera for the Canada France Hawaii
Telescope.
In 1995 he joined CAL Corporation now called COM DEV, as an
electro-optical engineer, developing space-borne scientific
instrumentation for the space physics, atmospheric sciences and
astronomy communities. He is currently a Staff Scientist at
COM DEV. He has been working on the Canadian contribution to
the James webb space telescope or JWST since 1997 on an instrument
on the Fine Guidance Sensor/and near InfraRed Imager and Slitless
Spectrograph or NIRISS system