“Boring is good in operations,” said Amanda Arvai, a flight operations manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Webb’s origins go back to at least 1989, but the spacecraft didn’t launch until the end of 2021. It cost some $10 billion overall. The Webb has detected carbon — a key ingredient for life — on a moon in our solar system, found a potentially habitable exoplanet, provided evidence of a phenomenon first proposed by Albert Einstein and much, much more.

“Webb is providing insights into longstanding mysteries about the early universe and ushering in a new era of studying distant worlds, while returning images that inspire people around the world and posing exciting new questions to answer,” Mark Clampin, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. “It has never been more possible to explore every facet of the universe.”

Most of the time, the Webb telescope manages itself just fine. Its orbit is programmed and science operations — pointing the sensors in the right spots to gather data — happen routinely.

Every six weeks or so, though, it requires some “station keeping.” That’s the term used by the telescope’s operations team to describe brief changes in Webb’s acceleration that keep it orbiting in the right place.

Earlier this year, The Banner was able to observe station keeping that changed the JWST’s acceleration by 22 centimeters per second.

It’s “not very big” in terms of change, Arvai said — but that’s because it’s much more efficient for operators to make more regular, incremental changes with the telescope’s thrusters than it is to do less frequent, longer burns.

Inside the operations room

The Space Telescope Science Institute uses the Deep Space Network, “the largest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system in the world,” to communicate with Webb.

Around 12:30 p.m. that day in May, contact began with the JWST through the network’s satellite in Canberra, Australia.

For about an hour, it was quiet in the operations center. Engineers and operators sat at their desks, watching as information came in from the telescope, to make sure its systems and subsystems were running properly. There was some quiet chatter, but it was clear people were focused.

“We’re all checking on each other,” said Jen Whiteleather, command controller for the JWST mission. “All of us are watching telemetry and making sure everything looks good.”

Space photos and other space-related decor dot the office. A model of the JWST stands outside the sleek operations center. While there are large monitors on some of the walls, the most dominant view is completely down to earth: the leafy trees of the Hopkins Homewood Campus outside the large windows.

There was some rousing in the center as the telescope slewed for 28 minutes before the thrusters fired. Slewing is when wheels inside the telescope spin to change its orientation, no thrusters required. You could imagine the way an excavator spins around without moving forward or backward.

At about 1:45 p.m., another spacecraft systems engineer, Michelle Elie, began the poll of all the systems on Webb. Using the “loop,” an internal, headset-based communications system, she ran down the list of systems on Webb to see if their operators were ready for the maneuver.

“ACS?”

“ACS is go.”

“CDH?”

“CDH is go.”

And on down the list. The “burn poll,” as it’s called, is fast. At 1:46 p.m., another voice came over the loop.

“Thrusters enabled. The burn is begun.”

Forty-seven seconds later, the burn was over. Webb had moved.

Almost immediately, some of the colors on Tim Johnson’s computer screen changed. The graphic representation of the JWST showed a charming change — little digital thrusters displaying flames for as long as they were actually firing in space. Johnson, a spacecraft lead engineer, wasn’t actually operating Webb that day, but observing.

Two systems on the spacecraft noticed something was wrong, and quickly told the experts on the ground.

Nobody moved. Not because of indecision or panic but because, in this case, nothing was actually wrong.

One system was warning that it was hotter than it was supposed to be, which was expected, because of residual heat from the thrusters burning.

The other was the spacecraft’s star tracker system (used so JWST can determine its location in space) telling operators on the ground it was momentarily lost.

That was also expected, Johnson explained, because the valves on the thrusters shake the system when they close, which causes vibrations that temporarily disrupted the tracker’s view of the starfield.

The burn lasted less than a minute and used just “tens of grams” of fuel, Johnson said. The spacecraft has enough fuel on board to last it about 18 or 20 more years.

And within minutes, the systems reported to the crew on the ground that everything is back to normal. The station keeping went as expected. The entire station keeping maneuver was 28 minutes of slew, 47 seconds of burn, and then another 28 minutes of slewing back.

“It was a boring day,” said Carl Hansen, a spacecraft systems engineer. “That’s a good day.”

An ‘absolute dream job’

Yes, the Space Science Telescope Institute is an office job. When the operations team isn’t in contact with the James Webb Space Telescope, it feels like any other white-collar work: PowerPoints, meetings, spreadsheets.

But behind that work is the remarkable fact that the James Webb Space Telescope, a million miles away, is collecting data and making discoveries that are changing how scientists understand our place in the universe.

“I look at this mission as a gift we’re giving humanity. We’re helping the scientific community understand who we are. Where we come from,” Whiteleather said. “We’re helping to understand our universe and our place in it.”

Hansen, who said he has been interested in space since he was a child (yes, because of movies like Star Wars), called working on Webb his “absolute dream job.” Arvai called the work “humbling.”

The sense of wonder that images from the JWST can inspire is just as tangible for the people working on the telescope. Whiteleather said she’ll sometimes look at an image produced from Webb, or read groundbreaking scientific papers using data from the telescope, and wonder if she was working when that data was collected.

“I love coming to work every day,” she said. “How many people can come into work and say, ‘Hey, I downloaded something that is going to change astronomy textbooks forever?’”