glue & the Webb Telescope ❤ a match made for the heavens! - 10QViz

How was this great match made? On April 23, 2012 in an email, then-Space Telescope Science Institute Director Matt Mountain asked Harvard Professor Alyssa Goodman:  “Presume through Alberto [Conti] you will touch base with the other JWST folks looking at IFU data visualization like Tracy Beck, Massimo (our Acting Head of the JWST[?].”   Three days later, on a trip to Baltimore from Boston, Goodman was in Mountain’s office at STScI, where he showed her his copy of  her “Principles of High-Dimensional Data Visualization in Astronomy.”  Conti, then a NASA “Innovation Scientist,”  had shared Goodman’s draft with Mountain, knowing how relevant the “principles” in the paper could be for JWST data in the future.   To Goodman’s complete surprise, about 5 minutes into the conversation, Mountain offered Goodman (who was not actively seeking funding at the time) “something like a million dollars” to make the “glue” software described in the draft “real enough to use.”  Note: Astronomers often still call the “Webb” or “James Webb” space telescope by its NASA acronym, “JWST.” Why were these astronomers so interested in glue + JWST?  The Webb telescope doesn’t just take images.  It can take a spectrum, breaking up light into constituent colors, […]