When the James Webb Space Telescope starts beaming cosmic images to Earth in four or five years, the world will be seeing the beginning of the universe through Utah's "eyes."
The beryllium used to create the telescope's 21-foot-diameter mirror was mined in the Beehive State, which has one of the only such mines in the country.
"Beryllium is light, easily deployable, provides energy savings and it handles itself under strain in cryogenic temperatures," said Patrick Carpenter, spokesman for Brush Wellman Inc., which owns the Utah mine.
One of the lightest metals, beryllium has played a role in space exploration since the 1960s, when it was used as part of spacecraft heat shields. It also was used to fix the Hubble Space Telescope.
The beryllium is mined in Juab County and processed at mills there and in neighboring Millard County, Carpenter said. The metal leaves the state in a powder form and heads to Ohio for processing. There, it's poured into a flat mold, and "tremendous amounts" of heat and pressure turn it into a metal slab, he said.
Technicians then pump out any gas and remove any stainless steel stuck to the metal slab, called a mirror billet. Then the billet is split in half like an Oreo cookie and two mirror blanks are produced.
"These mirror blanks are the largest ever produced in beryllium," according to the Web site Science@NASA.
The mirrors will make their way to Alabama, where workers will turn the blanks into a honeycomb structure to trim their weight without reducing their rigidity.
"The machined ribs are less than 1 millimeter thick -- almost paper-cut thin," Science@NASA reports.
A California company will polish the mirrors, and then they head off to Alabama's Marshall Space Flight Center's X-ray & Cryogenic Facility, which has a vacuum chamber that can re-create the frigid temperatures of space.
Eventually, the 18 mirror segments will end up at Maryland's Goddard Space Flight Center, where they will be arranged in a large hexagon to function as a single mirror. The piece is so large that it won't fit into a rocket, so it will be folded up, Origami-like, launched and then unfolded once it's in space.
The telescope, which is scheduled for launch in 2013 and will start functioning about six months later, will study the development of the universe, starting with the first faint glows after the big bang to the development of solar systems with possible life-supporting planets and the formation of our own solar system.
"The best move we can make is to launch the James Webb Space Telescope," said Roger Fry, a board member of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society. "It will fill the gap in the diminishing usefulness of the Hubble and provide far more spectacular images and have much more capabilities than the Hubble does."
Utah is not only producing the mirrors, but ATK Launch Systems also is building the "backplane" of the telescope that will hold the beryllium mirrors.
"It's a really huge project, and it's really exciting," said Kelly Franklin, general manager of ATK's Magna plant.
During tests at the Marshall Space Flight Center, the backplane successfully endured freezing temperatures, ranging from minus-405 degrees Fahrenheit to minus-351 degrees Fahrenheit for periods of two to three days.
"We need [the backplane] to hold steady while we're observing," said John Mather, James Webb Space Telescope senior project scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "These tests show that it will do that."
Playing a part in discovering some of the oldest galaxies and better understanding the big bang are boons to many Utahns.
Patrick Wiggins, NASA solar-system ambassador to Utah, is "stoked" about Utah's involvement.
"It's kind of neat to know that there's a telescope up there that part of the material was mined in Utah," he said, "and many of the telescope's structures were built right here in the state."
Ivo Stutznegger, a member of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society, also looks forward to the new images that the James Webb Space Telescope will provide with its infrared capabilities.
"It's great we have a part in it. The telescope is going to be immensely valuable in increasing our understanding of the universe and why things work," Stutznegger said. "We didn't have any idea how many new levels of understanding the Hubble would open up, and the James Webb, with its capabilities, will expand our understanding a magnitude more."
