CODA Telescope

The breakthrough wasn’t a new telescope. It was a new way to build one.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Towering warehouse shelves stretch out beneath rows of fluorescent lights. The scientist walking between them scans every section looking for the material he needs. It's meant for a spacebound telescope, set to launch from the SpaceX rideshare Twilight. A cosmic carpool with restrictions on weight, size, durability, and then, he sees it. Get up to 40% of the ceiling. Assistance needed. It's just a little too high on the shelf. Customer service needed on aisle 14. On aisle 14, bay SC3 of his local hardware store.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  From a manufacturability standpoint, aluminum is really easy. It's cheap. Seeing the raw material cost for like the blanks of Coda, it's 6061T6. You can buy these billets off of Home Depot, McMaster Car, a couple hundred bucks. There's nothing fancy about it.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  The scientists weren't actually purchasing these specific materials through a hardware store checkout line. But the project did require stripping the telescope down to its manufacturing basics. The challenge was that there was no standard telescope to start from.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Ground telescopes and astronomical telescopes, they're all unique. One shares virtually zero DNA with any other. The parts' commonality is close to zero. Space telescopes tend to be a little bit more standardized, but on a per-mission basis, they still tend to be unique snowflakes.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  For decades, telescope makers created custom instruments to help make the invisible observable. But after the turn of the century, satellites were getting smaller. Launch opportunities were becoming more frequent, and missions were no longer limited to only the big players. Space had changed. The way we built telescopes had not. Lawrence Livermore set out to change that. Not by building a better telescope, but by challenging how telescopes were built at all.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow today. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring. If you're passionate about tackling real-world challenges in science, engineering, business, or skilled trades, there's a place for you at the lab.

• 2:59Speaker 00

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• 3:41Speaker 00

  For centuries, telescopes have helped us see farther than the human eye alone ever could. They've carried our vision past the edge of our atmosphere, across our solar system, and toward worlds we may never physically reach. And as our curiosities have grown more ambitious, the telescopes we build to investigate them have become even more powerful and complex. Today, we can place them aboard small satellites where they act as payloads, send them into orbit, and use them to study parts of the universe that once felt impossibly distant. But underneath all of that progress is a surprisingly old process.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Beginning in the 1590s, glassmaking and lens grinding techniques have been vastly improving. It's only a matter of time until someone holds two lenses together and discovers just exactly what they can do. An extended eyeglass, in other words, which is soon to be known as the telescope.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  And what Galileo's telescope was doing for us is making objects that hadn't been visible before now visible to us.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  This really hasn't changed a whole lot since the days of Galileo.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Meet Sean Higby, the original program manager behind the Coda telescope and the mission manager for space sensing at Lawrence Livermore. At the heart of a telescope is its mirror. It gathers incoming light and directs it into an image, which means its shape has to be extraordinarily precise. And creating that precision has traditionally required a lot of time, patience, and repetition.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  How traditional glass telescopes are made is for the primary mirror, you make one blank. They all work about the same. Where you take the part and you rub on it, literally, you grind it in rough shape, and then you polish it and you rub on it to change the figure, i.e. what's the mathematical shape of the surface? And then you go test it, and then you rub on it some more in the high spots, and you go test it again. You rub on it some more in the high spots, and you go test it again. And you wash, rinse, and repeat this process. And as we jokingly say, we all grow old together while you rub on the surface of this mirror, because it just takes that long.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Galileo might not recognize the telescopes we build today, but he would recognize the patience required to make their mirrors. Each mirror is also made with a particular purpose in mind. Its shape and its tolerance are all being built around the specific mission the telescope is designed to assist.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  There's relatively few people that make them. They tend to be very, very expensive. The lead time is really long. There's not a lot of organizations that can buy them or could afford them, certainly at the kind of astronomical prices that they used to cost and typically cost. If a government customer went to the industrial base and says, "Hey, we want a telescope of about this half-meter aperture," you could easily expect prices back in the $20 to $40 million price point for quantity one or two.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  In 2013, 11 tiny satellites rode the same rocket. By 2015, companies were competing to launch their own small spacecraft markets. Space was becoming more accessible. But the telescope remained one of the hardest pieces to get to space. It was slow to build, expensive to buy, and difficult to repeat. The answer was a different kind of telescope.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  No one gets an award as a scientist for building a system that's below perfect. "Oh, what'd you do? Well, I made the perfect thing even more perfect, right?" And Coda is about a different thing.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Coda is not an acronym.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  That's Jordan Carburn, the principal investigator of the Coda telescope at Lawrence Livermore.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Coda is the name of a family of telescopes that we at Lawrence Livermore started developing in collaboration with Corning Specialty Materials back in 2016. And the idea back then was to have a "good enough" optical imaging instrument, a telescope that was good enough that could be proliferated, that could be widely and easily manufactured, that could be cheap, that could be quick to make.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Coda would take shape by combining two very different kinds of expertise. Lawrence Livermore brought optical design and systems engineering, while Corning brought manufacturing capabilities the lab didn't have in-house.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Corning brought a really unique thing to the party, some really unique coating technologies, some unique fabrication technologies.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Specifically for aluminum. And not just aluminum for the telescope's frame or housing, for the mirrors themselves.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  From a manufacturability standpoint, aluminum is really easy. And then from a machining standpoint, aluminum is relatively soft, so it's easy on your CNCs and your mills and all of this stuff to be able to machine it into shape. You can do that quickly, which then means you can kind of batch these out in quantities.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  That made a completely different manufacturing strategy possible.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  In a glass telescope world, A must be perfect, B must be perfect, they must be perfect together, and they travel their whole life together. Not so in this world. It's the realization that, well, wait a minute. If A and B are disposable, and C and D are disposable, and I have this ability to play this gambling, I can play this game where only 10% of them need to be good to make this strategy work. The yield can be astonishingly low, and the strategy works. All of a sudden, I can cherry pick, and now if I can cherry pick components, I can actually look at also how well do the components play with each other. It's roughly a 10x savings.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  And while an almost all aluminum telescope has major benefits, choosing an ordinary material for an extraordinary job also introduced new engineering challenges.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  The downside of aluminum is that it has a high coefficient of thermal expansion, the CTE. So aluminum is a good conductor. You have aluminum pans or heat traps. That means that it moves heat very well, but what that translates to is that the material actually grows and shrinks meaningfully with temperature fluctuations.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  For a frying pan, that expansion and contraction would barely be noticeable. But telescope optics operate on an entirely different scale. Small changes in the curvature of the mirror, or the distance between components, can affect how precisely the instrument focuses light, degrading the image it produces.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  When you're dealing with an optical system, especially in visible wavelengths of light, 400 to 800 nanometers of wavelength of light that we're looking at, and then it has a near-infrared spectrometer, you can have these large structural changes that are changing like the radius or curvature of the mirror, that are changing the relative alignment of these systems. That can be challenging.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  It would be like trying to measure something microscopic with a ruler that subtly stretches and shrinks every time the temperature changes. At the scale these telescopes operate, with targets light years away, even tiny shifts can throw the system off.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  So part of the clever design and engineering of Coda was that the optical and mechanical prescriptions, the design, was such that everything grew and shrank at the same rates. It's a generalization, but the system remained in focus as it varied in temperature.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  The team turned the problem into a design constraint. If aluminum moves, everything that matters needs to move with it.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  So that was a really big benefit then of how you're able to actually use this highly manufacturable material, but that is not stable.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  To keep Coda in focus, every part of the telescope had to respond as part of the same system. Lawrence Livermore's role was to coordinate that behavior across the optics, mechanics, and thermal design.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Livermore was then able to lend a lot of its expertise in high-performance computing to try and help mature the design and to be able to answer, is it good enough? You can test it. A lot of times, testing is really expensive. It requires all kinds of special equipment. So Livermore was able to support a lot through modeling and simulation. And that expertise is then built up both from all the optical expertise and optical modeling that was developed for the National Ignition Facility. So the main optical engineers at Lawrence had all come from supporting the NIF.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  That system's thinking didn't stop with modeling. Once the team understood how Coda needed to behave, they had to engineer a physical structure that could preserve that behavior in space.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  The spacecraft, they look like they're nice and stable and still. They're not. The reality is they go waka, waka, waka. In space, they're slowly and gently rattling your telescope throughout its entire lifecycle. Well, you have to manage that vibration. What was the Livermore addition? What we did was actually on the optical systems engineering of how do you get it in the box? How do you manage the thermal state?

• 12:46Speaker 00

  The thermal state is the temperature conditions surrounding the telescope and how those conditions change as it moves through space.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  If you actually control the insulation of the box, the container that goes around the system, if you control where the heaters are at, you can actually turn something that was a problem into something that's a benefit.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  By then, Coda had become more than an aluminum mirror. It was manufacturing, optics, modeling, thermal engineering, and structure, all working together.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  If you take the smartphone, which many of us have in our pockets, it's this aggregation of technology where before we had the smartphone, we all had telephones, we all had cameras, we all had the ability to record things, and we had the ability to shoot video, but we didn't have that aggregated into one product and into one thing that we could carry around in our pockets. And all of us have that capability.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Coda was built around a simple promise: make a capable space telescope faster, cheaper, and repeatable enough that more missions could actually afford one. But that promise only mattered if a real mission was willing to build around it. That opportunity came with Pandora.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  It's January 4, and the first email in my inbox that I see was the selection letter from NASA. Does this mean what I think it means? Like, do we actually, like, oh my god?

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring. If you're passionate about tackling real-world challenges in science, engineering, business, or skilled trades, there's a place for you at the lab. Right now, positions are open for a Senior Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Engineer and a Senior Business Operations Specialist. These are just a few of the more than 100 exciting roles available. At Lawrence Livermore, you'll work on projects that matter, from national security to cutting-edge scientific advancements. Join a team that values innovation, collaboration, and professional growth. Explore opportunities at llnl.gov/careers,

• 15:07Speaker 00

  where your next career move could make history.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  When scientists search for planets around distant stars, they rarely see the planet at all. They watch the star and wait for the planet to pass in front of it, dimming the light by a tiny fraction.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  As a planet passes in front of its star, it blocks some of the light, causing a slight drop in brightness. It's hard enough to see the other stars that the planet is orbiting. The stars are giant, the planets are really small. If I can see the star, I can take data of the star, and then the exoplanet would transit in front of the star, based on Pandora's perspective, and I see a little change in signal. And when I say little change, you're talking about a couple of parts per million.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  This is like noticing one specific person putting on a jacket in a stadium of a million people. The whole method rests on one assumption: that the star itself stays perfectly steady while you watch. But stars don't stay steady.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  We know from our own sun, stellar activity, solar storms, sunspots, stars are very active. And what can happen is that the changes in the star, when you take this differential measurement, you can end up then getting false positives or false negatives. It can mask some things.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  So when scientists get excited about a discovery, they have to ask a terrifying question: did this signal come from the planet? Or did the star just trick us?

• 16:48Speaker 00

  The Pandora mission was designed to solve this problem. Instead of one quick look at a planet, it would stare at a single star for days and weeks, building a detailed record of the star's behavior, so scientists could finally subtract the star's light from the planet's background.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  It's a $20 million cost cap, which sounds like a lot of money.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  The NASA team ran the numbers. The telescope they needed simply would not fit inside a budget that small, not through the traditional market, which is exactly the market Coda was built to break.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  It was really just peanut butter and jelly. They needed a project management and an engineering institution. They needed a telescope. We were looking to expand our presence and helping lead missions and trying to then get flight heritage for this telescope.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Pandora couldn't afford to build every part of the mission from scratch. So the team looked at what already existed. One step was taking a carpool with SpaceX. Pandora was launched on a transporter-like mission, and it was the first traditional rideshare mission launched through the NASA Venture Class acquisition of dedicated and rideshare contract.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  There is no main satellite. You could think of the school bus, right? Of like, hey, everyone get on the school bus. I'm going to school and dropping everyone off.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, across the country, just outside of Denver, Blue Canyon Technologies was already building 10 of the same spacecraft bus for another government customer, the platform that provides the telescopes with power, propulsion, and other essential systems.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  It was truly, no kidding, a commercial, off-the-shelf spacecraft bus. No design modifications. The company, Blue Canyon Technologies, they're out of Colorado. They had made a Saturn class, an Espa Grande, so think of three feet by three feet by a one foot. They built that for another government sponsor. You're building 10 of those? We would like to be number 11, please. However you want to build it, you tell me exactly. We will design our mission around your capabilities.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  That decision reflected something bigger about the way Livermore approached Pandora.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Pandora was the first mission that Livermore project-managed, soup to nuts. We don't have this big incumbency of like, we've been flying flagship $100 million missions for 70 years. That's in their DNA. Along for the ride with that comes a whole bunch of cultural heritage of how to think about problems, what's allowed, what's not allowed, how do you solve problems? And one of the things I love about Lawrence's space program is that we don't have that.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Over the next five years, the team had to bring the telescope, spacecraft, and supporting systems together into one flight-ready mission. And near the very end, one small piece of hardware threatened to complicate everything.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  You want to talk about embracing meaningful risk?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  The separation system, the mechanism responsible for releasing Pandora from the rocket, had tested slightly outside its specification.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  We contacted the vendor. Hey, is this okay? The vendor was like, yes, it's all good. Two thumbs up, move forward. We contacted the vendor again, just as the sanity check. Hey, we're still out of spec, are we still good? And they're like, well, actually, I don't know. You're probably fine, but we recommend more testing.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  I mean, this, yeah. You know, we're like a week away from having to ship to the launch site. Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  A week from shipping doesn't leave much room to maneuver. The budget was spent, and another round of testing wasn't a simple task. Retesting meant lifting the spacecraft, reinstalling a delicate mechanism, and taking on the risk of damaging something that had already made it this far.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  We had to talk to SpaceX, our spacecraft provider, NASA's involved. It came to a mission decision that we were like, you know, what are we going to do? I then delivered the message and made the decision that we're not going to retest. We're going to fly. It's going to be okay. There's definitely that like little nag though, right?

• 21:09Speaker 06

  Five, four, three, two, one. Engines full power and liftoff of Transporter 17. Go SpaceX, go Falcon.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  At 5:11 a.m. on a cold January morning in 2026, Pandora lifted off from Vandenberg aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, and SpaceX had a camera pointed right at it.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  It worked out to just be this picture-perfect Hollywood scene. All the other spacecraft had deployed. Pandora was one of the last to separate. And you just see the curvature of the Earth in the background. Pandora is lit, this camera is looking straight at it. And I'm like, if this doesn't separate right now, like if you get the little jolt and it holds on, you're like, this is going to be so bad.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  You see like Pandora get ejected from the spacecraft. The whole room then goes crazy and everyone's cheering.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Pandora was in orbit. After years of design and testing, Coda had finally become what it was built to be: a telescope on a mission. Eight days later, light from deep space struck its aluminum mirrors, and Coda opened its eyes for the first time. Pandora proved Coda could fly. The bigger question is what happens when you build it again and assign it to a new mission?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Coda is really designed for like multiple units, to take these highly manufacturable systems and support constellations and architectures of 5, 10, 50, 1,000 different satellites. We've shown as a proof of concept that yes, you actually can do one.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Repeatability is what changes the kinds of missions that become possible. And that matters as NASA opens the door to smaller missions working with much smaller budgets.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  There is a new class of missions called the pioneers class, all of them with a $20 million cost cap. Pandora was the first.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  For missions like these, lower cost isn't just about saving money. It can be the difference between an idea that stays on the ground and one that gets a chance to fly.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  We had telescopes before. Why do you think Coda is so special? And the response to that is, well, that may be true. But remember, the day before Coda, none of you had the ability to go to space. So you were sitting on the sidelines because you couldn't participate financially. What Coda did is it enabled all of you to figure out how to get into space.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  And once they get there, the impact extends far beyond the people who built the hardware.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  There's people that are going to get their PhDs using the data from Pandora. There's people at the Goddard Space Flight Center that are doing amazing stuff with that data. And again, all we did was facilitate it and bring it into existence.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  That's where Coda's larger promise starts to unfold. Not one telescope, but more opportunities for scientists to explore our curious universe.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  The thing that I am most passionate about, that I want people to embrace, I think there's so much untapped capability with existing technologies. Being able to think creatively about the tools that you have as an engineer. I fall much more into MacGyver than I do into inventing the new thing. I get really excited about figuring out how to like pull it off. There are so many examples in Pandora that just needed that MacGyver out of the box. How can I get crafty with the things that I have?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Exploration doesn't always begin with a new invention. Sometimes it begins by seeing new possibilities in what's already here.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  There's untapped potential with the technologies that we have in front of us that is ripe for getting crafty.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening.

• 25:45Speaker 00

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