What it takes to launch a telescope

I'm an astronomer who builds telescopes.

I build telescopes because,
number one, they are awesome,

but number two,

I believe if you want to discover
a new thing thing about the universe,

you have to look at the universe

in a new way.

New technologies in astronomy,

things like lenses, photographic plates,

all the way up to space telescopes,

each gave us new ways to see the universe

and directly led to a new understanding

of our place in it.

But those discoveries come with a cost.

It took thousands of people and 44 years

to get the Hubble Space Telescope

from an idea into orbit.

It takes time,

it takes a tolerance for failure,

it takes individual people

choosing every day not to give up.

I know how hard that choice is
because I live it.

The reality of my job is that I fail
almost all the time and still keep going,

because that's how telescopes get built.

The telescope I helped build is called

the faint intergalactic-medium
red-shifted emission balloon,

which is a mouthful,

so we call it FIREBall,

and don't worry, it is not going
to explode at the of this story.

I've been working on FIREBall
for more than 10 years,

and now lead the team
of incredible people who built it.

FIREBall is designed to observe
some of the faintest structures known,

huge clouds of hydrogen gas.

These clouds are giants.

They are even bigger than
whatever you are thinking of.

They are huge,

huge clouds of hydrogen that we think
flow into and out of galaxies.

I work on FIREBall

because what I really want
is to take our view of the universe

from one with just light from stars

to one where we can see and measure

every atom that exists.

That's all that I want to do.

(Laughter)

But observing at least some of those atoms

is crucial to our understanding
of why galaxies look the way they do.

I want to know

how that hydrogen gas
gets into a galaxy and creates a star.

My work on FIREBall started in 2008

working not on the telescope
but on the light sensor,

which is the heart of any telescope.

This new sensor was being developed
by a team that I joined

at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

and our goal was to prove
that this sensor would work really well

to detect that hydrogen gas.

In my work on this,

I destroyed several very,
very, very expensive sensors

before realizing that
the machine I was using

created a plasma that shorted out
anything electrical that we put in it.

We used a different machine,
there were other challenges,

and it took years to get it right,

but when that first sensor worked,

it was glorious,

a