To the edge of the universe and beyond this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

They call it the Super Bowl of Astronomy, and this year the American

Astronomical Society brought its annual meeting to my hometown of Long Beach, California.

We'll get a tiny sample of the 1900

events and posters and then sit down with a couple of astronomers who are part of

the James Webb Space Telescope team.

My colleague Emily Lachtoala also attended the conference and on Friday, January 11, she and

I visited a Northrop Grumman facility to see how the JWST is coming together.

Emily, did you find that tour at North of Grumman as interesting as I did?

Well, it's always fun to get up close and personal with spacecraft hardware,

although I should hasten to add that we didn't actually see any hardware

that's intended to be sent into space

that's still all in the prototype stage at this point,

but still, very cool.

The bus is hopefully the part that should give them the least amount of headaches.

It seems almost like an afterthought stuck on the underside of the spacecraft.

It's on the what they call the hot side of the spacecraft. The telescope's main feature is these five-layer

blanket that is supposed to prevent the sun from heating up its infrared

instruments too much. And so most of the cool stuff is on the cool side of the spacecraft, so to speak.

But the bus is this thing that's just, it's such a tiny spacecraft stuck on the hot side.

And yet when you walk up to it up close it seems like as big as as a

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