Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock on the James Webb Space Telescope launch
On Christmas Day 2021, I woke up excited – but not for the same reason as my then-11-year-old daughter, Lauren. While she was thrilled that Father Christmas had visited, my mind was occupied with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope – which I’d worked on and had been 20 years in the making.
There are 300 separate scenarios that can go wrong when you launch something into space, so I had the news on to keep track of what was happening. Lauren, my husband, Martin, and I had breakfast, and just as Lauren wanted to open her gifts, the countdown to launch began. I wasn’t going to deny an 11-year-old her Christmas presents, but I was quite distracted!
When the big moment came, I said, ‘Right, presents down! Christmas stops for one minute!’ We all held hands as we watched the work of 10,000 scientists from all around the world begin the telescope’s 1.5m-kilometre journey into space.
That evening, Lauren and I took mugs of hot Ribena into the garden and lay on the trampoline, looking up at the night sky – her searching for evidence of Father Christmas, and me waving off the space telescope.
Maggie’s book Webb’s Universe: The Space Telescope Images That Reveal Our Cosmic History (Michael O’Mara Books) is out now.
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