This is the first episode of the second season of the Meridian and we're once again coming to you from Lund Observatory in southern Sweden.

It is the 4th of March and we're starting the season with a very special guest crossing our Meridian today.  Ori Fox is an instrument scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute working on the mid-infrared instrument or Miri, which is one of the four instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope. You might remember him as the creator of the telescope tournament that was on Twitter, that we talked about last season.

This season we're also bringing you some field reporting. As we mentioned last season, Nick and his research team here at Lund Observatory were heading to La Palma to observe an exoplanet transit.  Later this episode, we'll get to hear how that went.

 

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The intro scene includes background music and 24 high school students saying astronomical words like “Space missions”,  "Solar wind", "The big dipper", "Galactic dynamics", "Gravitational waves", "Exoplanets", "Black holes", "Betelgeuse", "Dark energy", "Near earth asteroids", "Jupiter", "Ground based telescopes" and more.  Slowly it fades to everyone saying “The Meridian”.     

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Nic:

Hey Rebecca.

Rebecca:

Hi Nick, I've missed you so much?

Nic:

I've missed you too.

Rebecca:

Also missed doing podcasts a lot.

Nic:

Yeah, I really missed it.

Rebecca:

I actually saw that we got over 800 listeners on the first season.

Nic:

Yeah, I think my mum at least accounts for half of it.

Rebecca:

You know, I actually saw that Australia had dropped a few spots.

Nic:

I know. We used to be second and then the US overtook us.

Rebecca:

How was Australia?

Nic:

Really good, it was nice and warm. I got to see my family again. It's been over almost a year and a half since I've been able to see them.

So that was really nice. Got to hang out with them. Go camping with my brother. You know it was just fun all round actually.

Rebecca:

Just the thought of going camping right now for me that’s just crazy.  But we actually had snow for Christmas so.

Nic:

Yeah, OK, that's weird for me, but....

Rebecca:

Yeah.  So actually I wanted to ask you because, even here on this side of the planet we heard about this Tonga volcano. How was it down there? Did you feel it in any way or?

Nic:

It's funny that you mentioned that 'cause my parents went on a holiday when that happened and so they went to a really nice beach called Hyams Beech which is supposed to have the whitest sand in the world so my mom and dad went down there, for like a weekend getaway and then they go and basically they just see these gigantic waves crashing and normally it's a really calm beach and everything had washed up.

There was mud everywhere and apparently this was throughout the entire coastal system.  A whole bunch of really rough farm waves, so there we were feeling it a little bit, I guess, the strength of the impact.

Rebecca:

Because you could really see it from space, right? Which is what I saw.  

Nic:

I know.  Just mind boggling how big it was.

Rebecca:

Yeah, oh, but you were out camping?  So did you see any starts?

Nic:

I saw my beloved Southern Cross, so that's something that I've missed in the Northern hemisphere.

If you want to figure out where north is, you have to use Polaris, the northern star.

We don't have one in the Southern hemisphere, but we do have the Southern Cross and so there's a little rule trick that you can learn to basically determine where South is.

Rebecca:

It's a constellation, right? Sort of pointing towards that?

Nic:

Yeah, yeah, well, the the way you work is, there's two pointer stars and then you have a cross and then you draw 2 lines which intersect and then you drop down a basically drop down a line towards the horizon.

You have to sort of look at a video to really get it really good.

Rebecca:  

Yeah sure. I was going to say for listeners Nick is doing a lot of like pointing right now, but that's not really helping for those who cant see it.

Nic:

How was Sweden? How was Christmas? How was the cool weather? Did anything cool happen here?

Rebecca:

 Yes, I said it was snow. Wish for southern parts of Sweden is it's a big thing. So that was really nice. Otherwise you know it's been dark.

Nic:

Yep, fair enough.

Rebecca:

But that's nice because you can see a lot of stars. Also, I like to really see you know ISS passing by.

Rebecca:

It's one of my like treats.  You know, seeing it passing by. And I might wave sometimes to the astronauts.

And then 90 minutes later it comes back again and I think it's so cool.

Nic:

There was also another a really cool thing that happened on Christmas, yeah?

Rebecca:

Did you get presents?

Nic:

Well, I was actually referring to the James Webb telescope, but I did get presents, yes.

Rebecca:

I was sort of thinking of it as a big Christmas present for all astronomers.

Nic:

Yeah, it definitely was. Yeah, well, we actually watched the live stream together even across the...

Rebecca:

Yeah we did. We did. That was really nice.

Nic:

Yeah, it was a perfect run too. I think nothing went wrong at all and so after the long wait and the jokes that it'll never actually ever come, it happened and so hopefully....

Rebecca:

Yeah, I can't believe it really.

Nic:

Yeah, but I guess it's going to really push us forward in science and I'm excited to see what kind of data it will bring, and there's a chance that people here at Lund might even be able to use that telescope.

Rebecca:

Yeah, but we had this idea that we would go deeper into James Webb, right?

Nic:

Oh yeah, How do you plan that out?

Rebecca:

So we actually invited Ori Fox, an astronomer, that has been working on the James Webb into this podcast.

Nic:

Well, I'm excited to hear what he has.to say.

Rebecca:

Yes, lets invite him it, right.

 

---------------------- Scene change with music.    

 

Rebecca:

And now I'd like to welcome Ori Fox, a scientist working on the mid-infrared instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope, so welcome, Ori.

Ori Fox:

Hi, good morning, I'm excited to be here.

Rebecca:

Yeah, good morning.

Rebecca:

Yeah, so it's morning for you. You're joining us from, yeah, where are you?

Ori Fox:

Well, I'm I'm in Washington DC, but the Space Telescope Science Institude is up in Baltimore. It's about a 60 minute - one hour - drive for me, but we're all teleworking these days anyway, so I'm at home.

Rebecca:

Right, right OK, OK, Well that's nice but yeah, I hope you've had a good morning so far.

Rebecca:

So before going into James Webb I would like to hear about your background in science and how you end up working on JWST.

Ori Fox:

Yeah, so in Graduate School. I started with the intent to work on radio astronomy and radio instrumentation and I went to University of Virginia where you're right outside of Green Bank.  And when I arrived the first person I met with was not a radio astronomer, but an infrared astronomer professor named Mike Skradski who had just started a brand new infra Red Instrumentation Lab - that was looking for students - with a lot of money and a lot of energy.

I couldn't resist and I joined that group.  And I started working on infrared sensor technology in that lab and applying it to telescopes and that grew into a postdoc at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre where I joined the JWST project when they were selecting infrared sensors for the near infrared spectrograph.

And one thing turned into another, and I ended up finally working with a permanent position. Now at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Mid-Infrared instrument MIRI team.

Rebecca:

So JWST has fairly long history already. Even though it's only been to space for a few months. So when did you join the team?

Ori Fox:

Yeah, that's a great question. I joined. I actually joined in 2006.  And I remember when I wrote my proposal for participating in that programme with NASA, that my intent was to do three or four years of groundwork, and then I would be prepared for the launch in 2009, 2010 and I would be able to hit the ground running and do my science.

So that turned into about 10-12 more years longer than I expected, but that was a a nice bonus, as a matter of fact, because it allowed me to really set my science foundations, I don't think I would have been ready in 2010, so I'm in a much better place in my career right now to really make.use of the web.

Rebecca:

Right, So what have you been doing in that extra time? Is it to develop the tool better or working on the the science that James Webb will do?

Ori Fox:

Yeah, at that point a lot of the work that I had done was out of my hands and in the hands of the engineers that were building the spacecraft and the Sun shield out at Northrop Grumman. So during that time I was focusing mostly on my science. I did another postdoc at Berkeley and I was developing my science programme to study the dust in supernova systems.

It turns out that there's a lot of dust in our universe that is necessary to form stars and planets, including our own solar system, but we still don't really understand where all that dust comes from. There's a lot of really good theories, but the observations son't always match the theories and so one hypothesis is that the dust is coming from supernovae, so we had a long study with the Spitzer Space Telescope to look for dust, but by the time I started that programme, Spitzer had lost all of its cryogens - by design -and it was only able to operate at the shortest wavelengths 3.6 and 4.5 microns, and we started getting a lot of hints that dust were in these supernova systems, but we could never measure the amount of dust because to do that you need to go out to much longer wavelengths where bulk of the dust is emitting.

Rebecca:

Right.

Ori Fox:

And so we really set the stage for the James Webb Space Telescope, specifically the mid-infrared instrument, because we can now go out to those wavelengths, and so it's going to be really exciting to start to see what we've been missing all these years.

Rebecca:

Oh, so that's really what your sort of background and motivation for James Webb is to study the the dust in the Milky Way.

Ori Fox:

Uh, it's really just study the dust around supernova explosions. Most of all, these supernovae are are not in the Milky Way, they're extra galactic, and so they're pretty far away, and so that's my science. I do want to touch on the the reason the web was built was not necessarily for for dusty supernovae, although that's the beauty of all telescopes, some of the best discoveries are not what they were designed for.

 

 

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