By Peter Lyons Hall
The award-winning Warwick Robotics Team will host a live, digital meeting with NASA’s Bill Ochs, at Mountain Lake Park on Thursday November 30 at 7PM and by all accounts it will be a star-struck evening.
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 Lead Project Manager, Bill Ochs, it gave planet earth inhabitants a look back into what the universe looked like 13.5 billions of 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 that is still active – the static noise you hear or see on radios or television monitors.
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, N.J. 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 of 2003. After SORCE, he was appointed the Project Manager for LDCM and led the project through the difficult period of the LDCM Data Buy, flying an instrument on NPOESS, to the current mission implementation.
In December 2010, Ochs was appointed the James Webb Space Telescope Project 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. Bill currently lives on the west coast. He travels worldwide presenting and accepting interviews on such programs as 60 Minutes, NBC morning show and numerous locations worldwide.
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 Paul’s students were involved in. While Jim 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, Bill was hooked.
The Warwick Robotics Team competes in the TACA (Total and Complete Amateurs) #11995 FIRST Tech Challenge, a program for students in grades 7-12 where teams of 4-10 students design, build, and program a robot while making connections with their local STEM community. The entire process is documented by the team, and competitions are held with other teams in regional and worldwide tournaments. Participants learn Gracious Professionalism®, which is the spirit of the friendly competition that FIRST is about. To learn more about the team’s accomplishments, click on http://warwickrobotics.weebly.com/. No reservations are required for this event that is open to all to attend. The Mountain Lake Park facility is located at 46 Bowen Rd., Warwick, NY 10990.
