How Two Students Fixed the Focus of James Webb from Earth with Prof. Peter Tuthil, Dr. Louis Desdoigts & Max Charles (468)

When a problem with the James Webb Space Telescope left its images frustratingly out of focus, the solution wasn't fixed in space... it was fixed from Earth. At the University of Sydney, PhD students Dr. Louis Desdoigts and Max Charles spent two years rewriting and refining code to recalibrate a critical instrument designed by Professor Peter Tuthill: the Aperture Masking Interferometer. Their breakthrough sharpened the telescope's infrared vision unlocking clearer views of distant worlds, including volcanic activity on Io, one of Jupiter's moons. In a fitting tribute, the pair even got matching tattoos of the hardware they helped fix! Not only did their work restore clarity to one of humanity's most powerful observatories, it also saved NASA the immense cost and impossibility of repairing the telescope in space.

You can listen to How Two Students Fixed the Focus of James Webb from Earth with Prof. Peter Tuthil, Dr. Louis Desdoigts & Max Charles (468) online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

How Two Students Fixed the Focus of James Webb from Earth with Prof. Peter Tuthil, Dr. Louis Desdoigts & Max Charles (468) is an episode from Shirtloads of Science by Karl Kruszelnicki.

This episode is 28:59 long.

This episode was published on Apr 4, 2026.

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