Excited by our scientific results and the accessibility of the night sky for everyone, we instinctively think of the public engagement, outreach, and educational opportunities that astronomy and JWST provide when asked about societal impact. All stakeholders in the JWST mission have highly effective programmes in this area. In public talks and school programmes people clearly relate to the inspirational nature of the images and science now being produced and to the team work and international collaboration needed to bring JWST to launch. In this summary to set the scene for discussing the societal impact of JWST and astronomy, I indicate some of the other types of societal impact. For our governmental agencies that invest in missions the interest is very often societal impact in the sense of economic impact and progress. Below some are some examples of different types of such economic impact.
A good illustration of the importance of economic impact from astronomy missions to our governments is the ESA “Juste Retour” system. Each ESA member state contributes to ESA with the expectation that this investment is returned to their country via industrial contracts and economic impact. ESA operates an accounting system that tracks these benefits in relation to the investment over a number of years which is carefully monitored by the member states. Corrective actions are implemented by ESA in terms of which countries contracts are placed in, or the nationalities of people recruited into ESA employment, to keep the national returns in an acceptable degree of balance.
Historically, of course, astronomy has been a key and well-known enabler of agriculture, the measurement of time and navigation. Now the technologies we develop to study the Universe still have many applications and benefits, with a relatively recent and on-going example of very broad societal-economic impact being underlying protocols which enable Wi-Fi having their origin in radio astronomy (https://blog.patentology.com.au/2012/04/story-behind-csiros-wi-fi-patent.html).
Considering JWST in the context of economics, the construction of the mission was a high-tech investment by government agencies in skills and people. An estimated twenty thousand engineers, technicians and scientists contributed to the mission for 25 years, spread across hundreds of distinct companies, institutes and universities in 14 countries, 29 US States and Washington DC. Through their work solving the complex engineering challenges of JWST, all of these people developed skills and knowledge that moves into other areas when people move to new employers, or the companies win more or different contracts. To trace this in specific detail at the level of an individual’s career is very difficult, but perhaps it would be helpful to try and develop some examples or case studies?
More broadly, companies sometimes aggressively compete for contracts from NASA/ESA/CSA because the work is seen as prestigious, challenging and it both develops and demonstrates their capabilities. This means that the societal impact in terms of the economic value of a NASA contract to a company can be substantially greater than the nominal contract value if it helps the company to compete for future work. Anecdotal evidence for this type economic importance and impact can be seen in the numerous small parts of the MIRI instrument that have appeared on the “glossy front page” of marketing brochures and at trade fairs around Europe.
To build a mission like JWST that can explore fundamental questions about the universe requires the development of new technologies, pushing at the frontiers of engineering, and new expertise. Societal impact comes from numerous multidisciplinary applications of such “astronomy techniques” in other areas of science. This is more extensive, and can be more subtle, than simple re-use of “a technology” and is not necessarily the creation of a “spin out company”. Collaborations between engineers and scientists working in astronomy instrumentation or data with those in other fields of research bring the expertise and skills from space missions such as JWST to help solve problems in other areas of science. All of these ways of using the expertise are important sources of economic and societal benefit.
There are numerous examples of multi-disciplinary collaborations with the astronomy community, particularly towards medical and environmental sciences. I described examples that I am familiar with, but there are many others. In a project led by Cardiff University UK ATC staff helped to develop a new design of Retinal Densitometer to make quantitative measurements of retinal function, via multi-spectral reflectance measurement of the retina over time with a view to early detection of age related macular degeneration, one of the leading causes of blindness in the elderly (Margrain, T.H., Atkinson, D., Binns, A.M. et al. “Functional Imaging of the Outer Retinal Complex using High Fidelity Imaging Retinal Densitometry”. Sci Rep 10, 4494 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-60660-9 describes the project). It benefitted from skills in scattered light analysis, design of optical chains for simultaneous imaging in several bands, and adaptive-optics which were developed for JWST and ground-based observatories. Simple parallels between infrared observations of exoplanets and our own planet, led to the GHOST project with Leicester and Edinburgh University and the design of a Hyperspectral IR imaging spectrometer to measure greenhouse gases in the troposphere/stratosphere. Although used in a scanning mode, the data cubes would look familiar to users of the MIRI (“GreenHouse Observations of the Stratosphere and Troposphere (GHOST): a novel shortwave infrared spectrometer developed for the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle”, Neil Humpage, Hartmut Bösch, Paul I. Palmer, Phil M. Parr-Burman et al., Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9242, 92420P·doi: 10.1117/12.2067330 describes the instrument).
Data skills are important too, for example the ASTROTROP project fostered collaborations and common approaches for managing tropical forest information and astronomical data. In both cases software to combine information from 100s of sources and overlay information on different attributes have similar inter-operability data problems. Could there be new applications for the techniques being developed in fitting molecular and ice features in JWST data?
We can see societal impacts in action through the spontaneous use and reaction to the public release images such as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh) awarding the 2023 prize for Science in honour of the outstanding scientific images of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the associated developments in imaging technology. The press release Wissenschaftspreis 2023 der DGPh: James-Webb Space Telescope | Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie e.V.[1] notes that “Images play a central role in the media, in science and art and have a diverse impact on society – be it in education, business or politics”. However, as the community develops the case for the new facilities that will follow the rich capabilities of JWST and the under construction SKA and Extremely large Optical-IR telescopes, do we all need to become better and more familiar with enunciating and promoting the economic and multi-disciplinary benefits of astronomy?
[1] https://dgph.de/presse/wissenschaftspreis-2023-der-dgph-james-webb-space-telescope