NASA’s tech for James Webb telescope is boosting eye surgery precision

NASA’s new $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is showing humanity some of the first stars in the universe and offers the deepest look of the cosmos ever captured, with its enormous and powerful mirrors capturing bits of light from more than 13 billion years ago.

Meanwhile, technology developed by NASA as part of the decades-long effort to build Webb has already improved the vision of millions back on Earth by driving major improvements to LASIK eye surgery.

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Part of a process for measuring Webb’s mirrors has been incorporated into Johnson & Johnson Vision’s iDesign Refractive Studio, a device that takes precise eye measurements to map imperfections in visual pathways and cornea curvature, a NASA statement said.

The James Webb Space Telescope Mirror is seen during a media unveiling at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Maryland November 2, 2016. (Reuters)

One Johnson & Johnson (J&J) executive called the resulting information “an optical fingerprint unique to each patient’s eye,” according to NASA.

iDesign Refractive Studio is now available to eye doctors in 47 countries, and the iDesign technology has enabled well over 18 million successful LASIK procedures worldwide, according to J&J.

The technology got its start in the early 2000s, when Albuquerque, New Mexico-based subcontractor WaveFront Sciences worked with NASA to develop a system to measure deviations in Webb’s mirrors as they were being ground and polished to precise specifications.

“The mirrors were one of the really critical technologies we needed to develop to enable the observatory,” said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“We had to polish them in such a way that, when they cool down, they become the mirror shape that we want,” he said. “We had to match the curvature of one mirror to the next, which was a very challenging problem.”

WaveFront Sciences incorporated some of the algorithms it developed for Webb’s mirrors into a commercial product it called the Complete Ophthalmic Analysis System, or COAS, which could diagnose eye conditions by mapping the eye.

The technology changed hands several times and was rolled into the iDesign system before J&J Vision, which is headquartered in Santa Ana, California, acquired it in 2017, incorporating it into its iDesign Refractive Studio, which won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2018.

Once based on the limited information of a patient’s eyeglasses prescription, LASIK surgery today – guided by the iDesign Refracted Studio – can involve more than 1,200 measurements for individualized vision correction that is also fast and safe.

The space agency’s work often benefits people on Earth.

The first full-color image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary apparatus designed to peer through the cosmos to the dawn of the universe, shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, in a composite made from images at different wavelengths taken with a Near-Infrared Camera and released July 11, 2022. (File photo: Reuters)-EXPLORATION-TELESCOPE

“Ultimately, the investments that NASA made helped the company develop the technology to be useful for other applications – in this case, LASIK eye surgery,” Feinberg said.

Earlier this month, NASA released galactic beauty shots from the Webb telescope’s initial outward gazes.

The first shot – a “deep field” image released at a White House event – is filled with lots of stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground and faint and extremely distant galaxies peeking through here and there.

The James Webb Space Telescope is packed up for shipment to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana in an undated photograph at Northrop Grumman's Space Park in Redondo Beach, California. (NASA)

Part of the image is light from not too long after the Big Bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago.

“We’re going to give humanity a new view of the cosmos,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters last month in a briefing. “And it’s a view that we’ve never seen before.”

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