Warwick robotics team to host NASA Webb Telescope’s Bill Ochs

If you are interested in all things out of this world and beyond, mark your calendars for a digital meet and greet with NASA’s Bill Ochs at Mountain Lake Park (46 Bowen Road, Warwick) on Nov. 30 at 7 p.m.

There were thousands of moving parts involving three different countries (the Canadian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA, and NASA) together with dozens of diverse team members, but when it finally launched on Christmas day in 2022, the James Webb Telescope, under the direction of Bill Ochs, it gave planet earth inhabitants a look back into what the universe looked like 13.5 billion years ago. Earth is only 3.5 billion years old, so we can now, thanks to the Webb Telescope, see parts of the universe 10 billion years before Earth formed. The earliest object data collected by JWST is the cosmic microwave noise — the static noise you hear or see on radios or television monitors — that is still active.

Ochs received a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University and a masters in operations research from George Washington University. He began his career in 1979 with the Bendix Guidance Systems Division in Teterboro, NJ, as an electronics/software engineer, developing the flight software for the Hubble Space Telescope safing system.

In 1983, Ochs transferred to Goddard Space Flight Center as a systems engineer for HST operations. In 1990, Ochs joined NASA as the HST operations observatory systems manager. Ochs has also served as the HST deputy operations manager and the HST operations servicing mission manager. In 1998, Ochs became the project manager for the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE), which was successfully launched in January 2003. In December 2010, Ochs was appointed the James Webb Space Telescope operations servicing mission manager.

Ochs has been the recipient of the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, the Space Flight Awareness Honoree Award, various NASA group awards, 2010 NASA Honor Award for Outstanding Leadership Medal, and most recently the 2011 Robert H. Goddard Award for Outstanding Leadership.

One day at the Lakeside Farmers Market in Greenwood Lake this summer, Paul Woods, Warwick Robotics Team leader and high school teacher in the NYC school district, happened to have a conversation with one of the vendors present, Jim Hall, (solar system ambassador at NASA /JPL Caltech and Cornell Cooperative Extension senior master gardener). They discussed a number of NASA programs and how the two could combine their mutual interest in technology with what Woods’s students were involved in. While Hall often does presentations at area schools, he thought that something different was warranted for this audience of techno-pre-engineering-nerds. And once he spoke with his friend, Bill Ochs, Ochs was hooked.

The Warwick Robotics Team competes in the TACA (Total and Complete Amateurs) #11995 FIRST Tech Challenge, a program for students in grades seven through 12, where teams of four to 10 students design, build, and program a robot while making connections with their local STEM community. Competitions are held with other teams in regional and worldwide tournaments. To learn more about the team’s accomplishments, visit warwickrobotics.weebly.com.

This presentation is free and open to the public, with no reservations required.