John Stansberry

When Dr. John Stansberry attended a talk as an undergraduate about Earth’s magnetosphere and its interaction with solar wind, the physics major immediately turned his attention to space. After graduating, he pursued and accepted an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where his introduction to data analysis and space plasmas spurred him to earn his PhD. Here, he shares how his zeal for infrared astronomy has led to fulfilling roles at STScI, where he now supports the James Webb Space Telescope.

How did your career lead you to the institute?

I moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1999 to work on NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, an observatory that was launched in 2003 and specialized in far-infrared light. In 2005, I started working part-time for the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument team, which was also located there. I transitioned to working on NIRCam full-time in 2008 after Spitzer ran out of cryogen [or coolant] and visited Lockheed Martin in the San Francisco Bay Area frequently, where they were building the instrument, to support NIRCam’s testing.

In 2012, when the instrument was complete and delivered to the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, I felt like it was a good time to make a move. STScI didn’t have a Solar System scientist onboard and they needed some additional NIRCam support, so it was a natural fit. I was and still am really impressed by the people who work at the institute. My colleagues are professional, capable, and smart. I consider working at STScI a high point in my career.  I couldn’t ask for better.

What is your current role at the institute?

I’m an instrument scientist for Webb’s NIRCam instrument, a 40-megapixel imager that operates at near-infrared wavelengths. I lead the effort to organize its commissioning program. After launch, we have 180 days to commission the observatory. Most instrument commissioning will occur in the last 60 days, but NIRCam will be used extensively starting 35 days after launch, to align the telescope.

I also have two other hats: One is a systems engineering role for NIRCam, which involves adapting concepts of the type of science data we want to obtain, translating it into tools that astronomers will use to plan those observations, and then helping the software engineers at the institute to write and test the code that translates those observations into commands that can be sent to the observatory. I also make sure that Webb will be able to track moving targets in the Solar System. For this role, I work with the other instrument teams on similar system engineering projects.

What has it been like to see the progression of infrared astronomy from Spitzer to Webb?

I’m a lucky guy! That’s one of the great things about being a scientist: There are huge amounts of progress in all fields. I think anyone you talk to who has a career in science or engineering has a similar experience—the work you are doing when you graduate with a PhD is amazing and has never been done before, and then 20 or 25 years later you are still doing things that have never been done before. We keep improving the capabilities of these instruments. It’s rewarding to see the public respond to the findings in our field, since without public support, we wouldn’t be able to make these advancements.

What has the process of preparing for Webb’s launch and commissioning been like?

We’re actively testing everything. As we develop new capabilities or improve capabilities and write new pieces of software, we test each iteration. We’re also engaged in a series of rehearsals of the commissioning process, which includes a simulation of the entire observatory, from point-and-control systems all the way through data being transferred to the ground. It’s an incredibly complicated and high-fidelity simulator for the observatory.

How has the COVD-19 pandemic affected the process?

Previously we supported the rehearsals entirely onsite. We had to quickly come up with a way for people to access the computers remotely and manage many more communications. Just the verbal communications can be quite complicated at times, with a lot of different people needing to talk about a lot of things at once. It actually worked out quite well and, in some ways, improved the experience, because rather than only being able to have two people participate at a time in the control room, we are now able to have more people participate. So if staff are trying to solve a problem or ask a question, they can practice their processes as larger groups.

What about the Webb mission are you most excited about?

I’m really looking forward to getting the observatory commissioned and starting to do science. In about a year to a year-and-a-half, I hope to switch to the science that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

Article updated February 2021.