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Jenna Manto|The Patriot Ledger

Name: Tom Harkins

Hometown: Weymouth

In the news: Harkins is a flight engineer working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

Now you know: Harkins is working on the mostpowerful space telescope ever built, with a sunshield the size of a tennis court.

His story:Ever since he was a kid, Tom Harkins would tinker with LEGOs, try to build things, figure out how everyday objectsworkand fix broken items around the house with his dad.So,engineering was always a natural fit for him, he said.

After graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 2008, where Harkins focused on aerospace engineering his senior year and took classes onaircraft design and development, he startedworking for aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman in California.

Harkins initially worked on other projects in a rotation program that took him around the country from Florida to California, and he ended up on the James Webb Space Telescope team in 2013.

He now works out of his home in Maryland, where he lives with his wife and young kids, who he said find dad's work exciting.Harkins even has a model of the telescope at home for his kids.

"I tell my son, who's 4, and my daughter, who's 2, even though she's just starting to understand what it can (do)," Harkins said,"I talk to other students and professionals and it's inspiring. It's part of the reason I became an engineer. It's like how can we take an idea and make it into a physical reality we makethis idea of taking pictures of distant galaxies into a real machine that can do it."

NASA'sHubble Space Telescope has become a household name, but come October, the James Webb Space Telescope will launchfrom French Guiana, South America and become the most powerful space telescope ever built, Harkins said.

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TheJames Webb Space Telescope is unique in that itlooks into the infrared area of the electromagnetic spectrum, as opposed to only the visible light area of the spectrum, like the Hubble telescope does.

Harkins said thetelescope is like a "time machine," as it will essentially allow scientists to look back in time as close to the Big Bang as possible which was over 13 billion years ago. This is possible in the same way that human beings on earth view light from the sun that is eight minutes old, Harkins said.

As a flight engineer,Harkins spends most of his time working with his team on contingencies using a simulator to practice every possible situation that could go wrong and figuring out how they might respond.

Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which exists in the same orbit asthe International Space Station, the JWST will be sent into orbit one million miles from earth, Harkins said. With no astronauts coming to save the day, they need to make sure they have planned for everything.

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The effort is an international collaboration, Harkins said, between NASA, which provided the engineering, design and development aspects of the project, the Canadian Space Agency, which contributed a few instruments, and the EuropeanSpace Agency, which isproviding the launch vehicle.

"Scientists from many, many countries are gonna be wanting to get their hands on this data," Harking said."It's gonna push the boundaries of discovery. And so the whole world is participating."

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Newsmaker: South Shore native working on NASA space telescope - The Patriot Ledger