Jack Brown, a district volunteer who has helped organize science festivals in Westerville for years, is hosting a Westerville booth during the upcoming COSI Science Festival in May and has invited high school students to join him.
Last week, he gave a group of Westerville Central High School students a glimpse of what his display will feature: mini-models of the different technologies inside the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in December and is designed primarily to conduct infrared astronomy. The space telescope, which orbits the sun nearly 1 million miles from Earth, shared its first images last week.
Westerville-based Lake Shore Cryotronics is one of the many subcontractors on the $10 billion project.
“The point of the exhibition is to provide a set of activities for students from elementary to post-graduate who have an interest in astronomy, engineering or physics,” Brown told the WCHS group. “It covers a wide gamut of technologies and science issues in building the Webb Space telescope.”
“What I hope to get out of today is learn a little bit more about your interest, which of these activities you might like to help manage during the festival.”
Brown set up the models for the science festival booth at the WCHS media center, walking students through the various experiments and explaining how the technologies are used by the space telescope. Through the models, students explored infrared light and how it is gathered, learned about the telescope’s heat shield and how it operates to maintain ultra-low temperatures, and aligned mirrors in one of the models to understand how the telescope can provide sharp images of celestial objects.
By operating the Westerville booth and helping with the experiments, Brown hopes to build on students’ interest in science.
“I want them to get excited about a career in science,” he said.
Brown plans to make similar visits to Westerville North and Westerville South high schools.