As an indelible reminder of this thrilling result, Louis Desdoigts, now a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden in the Netherlands, and his colleague Max Charles, had tattoos of the instrument their work has repaired inked on their arms.

This remarkable technical breakthrough saw the development of a software fix that corrected blurring in images made by NASA’s multibillion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope,restoring crisp performance to one of its vital scientific instruments – all without the need for a space mission or astronaut repair.

The achievement builds on the only piece of Australian-designed hardware on the JWST – the Aperture Masking Interferometer – 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 images of stars and exoplanets by combining light from multiple patches on the telescope’s main mirror, a technique known as interferometry.

However, after JWST began operations, scientists discovered that AMI’s performance was being degraded by subtle electronic distortions in its infrared camera detector. These were injecting fuzziness into recovered images – a problem reminiscent of the telescope’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope’s early “blurry vision” after launch, which famously required a space shuttle mission and astronaut spacewalks to correct.

Rather than designing a new lens or mounting such a costly rescue mission, the PhD students from Professor Tuthill’s group, also working with Associate Professor Ben Pope at Macquarie University, created a data-driven, software-only calibration system that fixed the focus from the ground.