Matt Gialich

So Webb is probably somewhere in the range of 500,000 miles away where it's stationed right now.

And that was so it doesn't get any reflection from the Earth, right?

That's why they wanted it out there.

So it could be super cool than not getting heat from the Earth to get better images.

If you really want to dive deep, Shani, you can go read my blog post on this, which is like 10,000 words of the details here.

But how do they communicate on Earth is...

So it's a lot of ways to think about this.

At the end of the day, they're really far away.

So they're losing a lot of radiated power from the spacecraft over that great distance.

So how do we communicate?

Really twofold, big ass dishes on the ground.

So if you've ever seen like the early James Bond, I should say early for me James Bond movies with Pierce Brosnan, right?

Where he's like in Russia and they're in front of like a big dish.

Those are the fucking dishes we used to listen to the spacecraft.

The one we used on our last mission was 32 meters across.

So put that in your head.

There's a 100-foot Freedom Units dish that we're pointing in space.

And we have to be accurate to be within 0.1 degree.

So it's got a little tiny beam that we're trying to point out there.

And that's just to get enough gain to pick up the signal from the satellite.