Jackie Townsend

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77 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Jackie Townsend’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · A space telescope launch + Alvin submersible check-up · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

Roman is expected to come back with 50,000 up to perhaps 100,000 exoplanets that Hubble or Webb might be asked to follow up on.

Excellent question.

So the survey that I just talked about will be inferring that they are there.

It's not going to be imaging them, however.

We are also carrying something called a coronagraph, which is a technology demonstration instrument that was developed out at our partners at JPL out in California.

And that has special masks and data processing so that it can actually dim the light of the primary star so that you can see in a couple of pixels.

the light from the planet that's next to it.

Now, it's a technology demonstration.

So it's the first time that we've actually tried to do this in a system on orbit.

So it's not going to be like right out of the gate.

We're going to go be imaging Earth-like planets around other stars.

But we are going to demonstrate the ability to dim down the light from that primary star by six to eight orders of magnitude.

So it's going to do some amazing things.

Am I right?

You are correct.

We are the first time that a flagship mission, that's what we call these big, great observatories like Hubble or Webb more recently.

We're the first time that we have delivered ahead of schedule and we're actually coming in under budget.

So delivering ahead of schedule and under budget means essentially that every team member made really good decisions day after day for more than a decade.

Those decisions were often to just give a little extra bit to notice when a teammate was struggling with something and offer to help or to stay maybe 20 minutes extra tonight to position the morning shift to get something done sooner or more efficiently.

And more often to double check this week to make sure everything is done that needs to be done to be ready for next week's work, because sometimes we can pull that work in early or it just makes sure that we will continue to execute on time.

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