This Delaware Native Oversees a $10 Billion Telescope at NASA

A Sussex County native’s fascination with space took her to NASA, where she’s advancing the field of science with a $10 billion telescope.

At NASA, Delaware native Jane Rigby helps run the now-famous James Webb Space Telescope. Courtesy of NASA.

As a child, Jane Rigby fell in love with astronomy and practiced peering at stars with a small telescope in a soybean field. Now, she gets to examine distant galaxies with perhaps the best telescope ever made—or at least the one with the best vantage point.

A 1996 graduate of Seaford High School, Rigby went on to study astronomy at Penn State University and now works at NASA, where she helps run the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The now-famous telescope launched Christmas Day in 2021, traveling a million miles from earth. As project engineers gnawed at their fingernails, the approximately $10 billion piece of finely tuned technology unfolded to full size without a hitch and began sending crisp images of entire galaxies blanketing the skies, thick as stars.

As the operations project scientist for the telescope, Rigby has what she calls a jack-of-all-trades job. She helps oversee the allotment of coveted time slots for researchers all over the world, and also gets to work with a team on her own research.

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“A lot of my job is also making sure the telescope is working,” she says, in partnership with the project’s engineers.

Rigby recalls talking her father into buying a used telescope that was advertised many years ago in the Sussex Guide, the long-running local classifieds booklet. While nothing like the JWST, the 8-inch Celestron did give her a taste of what was possible. She and her dad set it up in the field across the street from their home, she says, which worked fine when soybeans were planted, but not so well when tall cornstalks blocked the view.

“I remember seeing when comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 hit Jupiter [in 1994], seeing that from the backyard, and that was spectacular,” Rigby says.

At NASA, Delaware native Jane Rigby helps run the now-famous James Webb Space Telescope. Courtesy of NASA.

Fascinated by space for as long as she can remember, Rigby used to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage on PBS while she was in preschool. At the time, it went a little over her head, she acknowledges. Still, “I thought it was so cool…like, Oh, my gosh, you mean all that’s out there?” When she was 8, her dad took her outside to see Halley’s comet go by. “It was not a great comet, honestly,” Rigby says. “But we found it.”

Now at NASA, she gets to work at “advancing not just my own science but trying to advance the whole field of science. And that feels like a lot of responsibility. …This telescope that we’ve built is amazing. And it is obviously going to rewrite much of what we understand about modern astronomy,” she says, acknowledging her duty to use it well.

“This is an expensive telescope that is a real investment from multiple countries. And we want to do right by the science.”

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“This is an expensive telescope that is a real investment from multiple countries. And we want to do right by the science.”

Almost across the board, it’s working better than expected, Rigby says. “So, because of that, we can see deeper into the universe, faster than we expected. We are seeing galaxies further back in time than we expected…as they looked only 300-something million years after the Big Bang.”

As the first images the telescope sent back stunned the world, it received extensive press coverage. “I got to go to the White House and show our first results to the president and the vice president, which was a big deal,” Rigby says. “And, of course, we talked about Delaware afterward.”

Related: The Delaware Museum of Nature & Science Delights in Wilmington

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