I was amazed when my company, Epner Technology, was mentioned on Fox News during an interview with NASA about the James Webb Space Telescope and its instrument package.
A little over 20 years ago today, we at Epner Technology received an email that a half dozen engineers from NASA Goddard wanted to visit us in Brooklyn. Of course, we accommodated and within 2 weeks they made the trek via Amtrak and were sitting in our office conference room. I was told during this meeting that the Thermal engineers at NASA were specifyingour Laser Gold coating into many parts that were being designed on all 4 instruments on the JWST due to its high reflectivity/low emissivity characteristics. They were familiar with our coatings from the GOES weather satellite instrumentation we had been coating for the previous 20 years, as well as a myriad of many other space programs Epner had partnered with NASA on from ships going to Mars and Mercury to the many other satellites revolving around the earth. These engineers wanted to see where they were putting all their eggs in to make the JWST a success.
As the morning moved into the afternoon more than one engineer stated that the James Webb was not like the Hubble in so many aspects. And the most important of these aspects was that if NASA had any issue with the Telescope after launch that could not be addressed remotely it was just too far away to make any repairs; Unlike what was done to repair the Hubble space telescope where Epner coated parts for Ball Aerospace and others to aid in that repair effort. We were warned by those engineers that NASA was going to go through many iterations of testing to cover all possibilities imagined before any launch would happen. The Launch, and the parts we supplied for the mission had to be flawless.
Supporting the JWST mission has been a very high visibility project for Epner, one of the few that we are actually allowed to discuss publicly. Watching the slow progress over the last 20 years has made moments like this especially meaningful for our company. Our gold plating is helping to support research on the outermost frontier of space.
On December 10th 2021, we received an invitation to join NASA Administrator, Bill Nelson, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen, and other senior agency leaders for a special one-hour virtual event for Webb’s partners and stakeholders to celebrate Webb’s journey to space. They thanked us for our organization’s role in the development of the James Webb Space Telescope and informed us of the latest launch plans, which at the time was delayed.
Finally! On Christmas of 2021, when the JWST finally did take off, I still remembered those engineers’ words and told everyone that would listen. The launch is the easy part, let’s make sure everything works. And in July of 2022 we saw that everything worked beautifully! Now in 2024, we are just beginning to understand the capabilities of the instrument and how our Laser Gold has increased its performance.
-Paul Brancato, President, Epner Technology
I’m sure David is smiling down at all the Epner has done and continues to do. Paul….great job carrying on his blog tradition. Don’t know if you can ever out do his Will Smith gold penny one…that was epic Dave!