IAF Excellence in Industry Award 2023

Throughout the James Webb Space Telescope’s (Webb) development, NASA and Northrop Grumman leveraged strong relationships with the European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), subcontractors, and ultimately with communities around the world to execute a near-flawless final integration and testing phase prior to launch. Thousands of engineers and hundreds of scientists worked to make Webb a reality, along with 300 universities, organizations, and companies from 29 U.S. states and 14 countries, including over 800 small businesses.
Webb’s successful mission has enabled astrophysicists to take the deepest, sharpest infrared image of a distant galaxy, probe previously unseen regions of space, and detect carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, and these accomplishments are only the beginning.
The Deployment of Webb was executed on the journey to its final orbit (a million miles from Earth), included 344 single-point failures, and required hundreds of components to perform flawlessly. The global team orchestrated the process seamlessly.
As the world’s largest, most powerful, and technologically challenging space telescope, Webb is a major accomplishment in the field of astronautics. Webb features many cutting-edge innovations, and is a game changer for global astronomers, looking back in time over 13 billion years to the first stars and galaxies forming in the early universe.