More than 25 years in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope ("Webb") blasted into space recently on a one-million-mile journey to reveal the origins of our Universe while capturing the formation of stars and planets in distant galaxies—some of which may be capable of sustaining life. While much of the attention was focused on the launch site in French Guiana that day, Illinois ECE alumnus Shashvat Nanavati (BSEE '13) and his communications subsystem team were nearly 3,000 miles away in the Mission Operations Center (MOC) in Baltimore, MD, ensuring that critical communications with the NASA-funded satellite were occurring properly.
