The partners began working together in 1996. They had a Hubble success behind them and wanted a successor that would push astronomy further. Today the James Webb Space Telescope is an international project led by NASA, with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency as partners, according to ESA’s own description of the collaboration.
How Europe signed on
ESA’s Science Programme Committee formally approved the agency’s participation in 2003. Four years later, in 2007, NASA and ESA signed an agreement formalising Europe’s four major contributions:
the NIRSpec instrument; the optical system of the MIRI instrument; the Ariane 5 launcher with all launch services; and scientists to support mission operations.
In return, ESA gained full partnership in Webb. Astronomers from ESA member states get access to the observatory on the same terms they have on Hubble. European scientists sit on all of the project’s advisory bodies and can win observing time through peer review, and ESA expects a minimum share of 15% of the total observing time.
Who built what
NIRSpec was built by European industry to ESA’s specifications. The ESA Webb Project at ESTEC in the Netherlands manages it, and the prime contractor is Airbus Defence and Space in Ottobrunn, Germany. Not every part is European, though. The detector and Micro-Shutter Array subsystems for NIRSpec come from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
MIRI was a joint effort between Europe and the United States. Its main partners are ESA, a consortium of nationally funded European institutes, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard. The European institutes built the imager, the spectrographs and the coronagraph to ESA’s standards. JPL supplied the detectors and the dedicated cooler systems.
Running the telescope
Day-to-day work happens in the United States. The science and operations centre sits at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which handles both the technical and the scientific operations of the observatory. ESA provides 15 astronomers to that centre for the duration of the mission.
That staffing is part of the bargain struck in the 2000s: Europe supplied hardware, a rocket and people, and in exchange its researchers have a seat in the control room and a guaranteed claim on the telescope’s time.
