Dr. Alison Nordt ’88 returns to Fishburn Auditorium to speak about developing the NIRCam on the Webb Telescope

​From a starry-eyed kid with dreams of going to space, to an opto-mechanical engineer developing a camera that can take pictures of the first stars and galaxies in the universe, Dr. Alison Nordt ’88 has accomplished what many can only imagine.
 
After graduating from NCS in ’88, Cornell in ’92 and Stanford in ’94 (MS) and ’99 (PhD), Nordt went to work for the space division of Lockheed Martin.
 
“The idea of building space telescopes was fascinating,” Nordt said in a Zoom interview with the Herald staff, Dr. Naginey and Astronomy student Jack Bohr ’23. “Within three years of being there, the NIRCam program was in the proposal phase, and I was asked to help on it for two weeks. Two weeks became 20 years. It was a fascinating program, and I was really interested in the science, and of course, the science of how to build it.”
 
Nordt said she cannot remember a time when she was not interested in space, having been born around the time of the early Apollo missions. Her mother read about Space Camp starting in Huntsville, Alabama. While her family was still living in New Jersey, Nordt went to Space Camp in 1982, the second year after it opened. She returned every summer after moving to Roanoke and eventually became a counselor during her time at Cornell.
 
“I went and I just loved it,” Nordt said. “It was the greatest experience for me. I was this little geek who loved space . . . . I would say space camp was reinforcing. It wasn’t what made me originally want to do space, but it was an environment that I loved.”
 
Her family moved to Salem because her father and uncle moved the family business to Roanoke. Already a soccer player, Nordt was disappointed to discover that North Cross did not have a girls’ team, so Coach Richard Cook invited her to play with the boys’ – initially on the JV, and eventually on the Varsity team. Cook said she was “the first off the bench” on “maybe the best team” he ever coached. The team went 22-1 and won the Virginia Independent Conference title in 1988.
 
“It was challenging,” she said. “[The ’88 team] was incredible. I think overall, I was accepted by the boys, we certainly played as equals, and I wasn’t coddled in any way for being the girl on the team. I think it was an incredibly shaping experience to play on that team because it was very challenging. 
 
“One of the things it really prepared me for was engineering school. . . . at that point about 10 percent women, and so it was a very male-dominated field – much less so now – as we’ve made great strides in improving women’s representation in engineering and science. 
 
“By playing on that team and by playing boys soccer, I think I was really prepared for making it in a group where I was the only girl. It was harder in soccer than it was in engineering, because I could compete on an even foot in engineering [more] than in soccer, where I just wasn’t as fast or strong. In the grand scheme of things, it really made a difference in my life.”
 
In addition to helping her play soccer at Cornell, she said NCS prepared her to write well. “When I was in engineering school, my peers were not able to write as well [as I could],” Nordt said.
 
History teacher Hugh Meagher inspired Nordt. She also wrote for the Scarlet Letter – the original student newspaper. 
 
In January of 1986, when the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated shortly after liftoff, Nordt remembers being so shaken that she needed to go home early that day. 
 
For her senior speech, she studied the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975, when an American spacecraft connected with a Russian capsule to make a “handshake in space” – a sign of hope for peace between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. 
 
The Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) that Nordt led her team to develop at Lockheed Martin is the primary camera on the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb has a primary aperture comprised of 18 segments that is about six and a half meters in diameter. NASA chose Lockheed Martin’s NIRCam to capture images that the Webb Telescope enabled as it sits almost one million miles from Earth.
 
After the telescope settled into its projected spot in space, the NIRCam powered up. The initial photos from the camera needed time to be compiled into image that the public could recognize.
 
“[The first image] was a picture only a mother would love,” Nordt said, “because there were 18 segments of the primary mirror . . . it looked like 18 smudges of light. And someone said, are those cosmic rays? No, that’s starlight. It was amazing.”
 
As a mother of two teens, who have spent some of their summers playing soccer at North Cross while visiting their grandparents, Nordt found time to go on adventure across a different kind of space. She and her family sailed from the Caribbean to French Polynesia over the course of about 15 months in 2016-17.
 
Nordt will return on March 22 to the same stage where she made her senior speech 24 years ago.