How two Sydney college students mounted the concentrate on the James Webb Space Telescope

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From:
The University of Sydney

A pair of Sydney PhD college students helped sharpen the view of humanity’s strongest area observatory – with out leaving Earth. As an indelible reminder of this thrilling consequence, Louis Desdoigts, now a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden within the Netherlands, and his colleague Max Charles, had tattoos of the instrument their work has repaired inked on their arms.

This exceptional technical breakthrough noticed University of Sydney researchers develop a software program repair that corrected blurring in photographs made by NASA’s multibillion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),restoring crisp efficiency to one in all its important scientific devices – all with out the necessity for an area mission or astronaut restore.

The achievement builds on the one piece of Australian-designed {hardware} on the JWST – the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) – created by Professor Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney’s School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy. The AMI lets astronomers to take ultra-high-resolution photographs of stars and exoplanets by combining mild from a number of patches on the telescope’s most important mirror, a way referred to as interferometry.

However, after JWST started operations, scientists found that AMI’s efficiency was being degraded by refined digital distortions in its infrared digicam detector. These have been injecting fuzziness into recovered photographs – an issue harking back to the predecessor to JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope’s early “blurry vision” after launch, which famously required an area shuttle mission and astronaut spacewalks to right.

Rather than designing a brand new lens or mounting such a pricey rescue mission, PhD college students Louis Desdoigtsand Max Charlesfrom Professor Tuthill’s group, alsoworking with Associate Professor Ben Pope (at Macquarie University), created a data-driven, software-only calibration systemthat mounted the main target from the bottom.

Their system, known as AMIGO (Aperture Masking Interferometry Generative Observations), makes use of superior simulations and neural networks to mannequin how the telescope’s optics and electronics behave in area. By understanding an imperfection through which electrical cost bleeds over into neighbouring pixels, a course of referred to as the brighter-fatter impact, the staff developed algorithms that “de-blurred” the pictures and restored AMI’s full sensitivity.

“Instead of sending astronauts to bolt on new parts, managed to fix things with code,” Professor Tuthill mentioned. “It’s a brilliant example of how Australian innovation can make a global impact in space science.”

The repair has produced spectacular outcomes. With AMIGO, the James Webb Space Telescope has achieved sharper-than-ever detections of faint celestial objects – together with the direct imaging of a dim exoplanet and a red-brown dwarf orbiting the close by star HD 206893, about 133 mild years from Earth.

A companion research led by Max Charles, a PhD scholar at Sydney, has demonstrated AMI’s renewed focus by capturing high-resolution photographs of a black gap jet, the volcanic floor of one in all Jupiter’s moons (Io) and the dusty stellar winds of WR 137 – pushing the boundaries of JWST’s capabilities.

“This work brings JWST’s vision into even sharper focus,” Dr Desdoigts mentioned. “It’s incredibly rewarding to see a software solution extend the telescope’s scientific reach – and to know it was possible without ever leaving the lab.”

Dr Desdoigts has now landed a prestigious postdoctoral analysis place at Leiden University within the Netherlands.

Both research have been printed on the pre-press server arXiv. Dr Desdoigts paper has been peer-reviewed and can shortly be printed within the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. We have printed this launch to coincide with the latest round of James Webb Space Telescope General Observer, Survey and Archival Research packages.

Associate Professor Benjamin Pope, who will current on these findings at SXSW Sydney on Friday, mentioned the analysis staff was eager to get the brand new code into the arms of researchers engaged on JWST as quickly as doable.

RESEARCH

Desdoigts, L. et al ‘AMIGO: a data-driven calibration of the JWST interferometer’ arXiv:2510.09806 Under peer-review at Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

Charles, M. et al ‘Image reconstruction with the JWST interferometer’. arXiv:2510.10924 (awaiting peer-reviewed)

DECLARATION

The researchers declare no competing pursuits. Funding was acquired from the Australian Research Council, Big Questions Institute, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, National Research Council Canada, National Science Foundation (USA) and NASA.

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