Farsighted science

There were cheers among space scientists when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched in December last year. There is now elation as the first images have started coming through – and they truly are breath-taking. But this isn’t just a triumph that benefits astronomers, the multi-billion dollar telescope should be a boon to chemists too.

But the JWST has had a long and tortuous road to the stars. Ideas for a new telescope that would eventually replace the Hubble Space Telescope were being bounced around in the 1980s with the first serious designs produced at the end of the 1990s. At the inception of the project, the telescope was expected to launch in 2007. Fourteen years later the cheers must have been accompanied by sighs of relief as the telescope winged its way to a remote point in space beyond the Earth on an Esa rocket.