Jane Rigby

Jane Rigby is an American astronomer, the James Webb Space Telescope senior project scientist at NASA, and a social activist in the astronomy community. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024. The medal is the highest US civilian award. President Biden presented the award to her for her work on the James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Telescope is one of NASA’s multi-billion dollar instruments in space. The telescope helps take images of deep space. Jane Rigby is the senior project scientist. This means she helps keep the telescope working. The telescope has found many discoveries in deep space. Jane Rigby has worked with many other important telescopes in her career, like the Hubble Space Telescope, Spritzer, the Keck Telescopes, and the Chandra x-ray Telescope. She also wrote around 150 papers on her discoveries in her career.

 Early life 
She was always interested in space and wanted to be an astronaut when she was a child. Jane Rigby got a masters and doctoral degree in astronomy at the University of Arizona.  

 Activism 
She helps make queer astronauts and other groups that struggle to become astronomers more welcome in the astronomy community. She has been helping set up meetings to advocate for those groups during her career.
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